While traveling in the Czech Republic, Emmanuel Macron returned to his comments on Monday March 4 concerning the possible sending of Western troops to Ukraine. “ We refuse to enter into a logic of escalation », Tempered the French president. At the same time, a caricature of the head of state on the front page of the German satirical newspaper Titanic appeared on social networks. RFI’s Info Verif unit carried out an investigation into this new false cover broadcast by Russian propaganda.
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Was Emmanuel Macron caricatured on the cover of the German satirical magazine Titanic of March 2024? This is what several Internet users have been saying, wrongly, on social networks in recent days. Their narrative is based on an image. We see Emmanuel Macron armed with bottles of wine and a baguette, dressed in military attire and dropping frogs into the sky from a plane.
This caricature is called, in German, “ Macron sends French reinforcements to the Ukrainian army “. It directly refers to the comments made by the French president on February 26, 2024, when he declared that sending Western troops to Ukraine could not “ be excluded “.
Verification done, the German magazine Titanic never actually published this front page. To see this, simply go to the official website of the German media and look for the magazine dated March 2024. We then find the authentic cover, dedicated not to Emmanuel Macron, but to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The logo, the graphic charter, the barcode and even the authentication number have been faithfully reproduced to deceive the vigilance of Internet users.
The Shadow of Portal Kombat
According to research by the RFI Verification Info cellthis false cover of Emmanuel Macron appears for the first time online on the evening of March 4, on the Telegram channel and the VKontakte account of @russosphere which mentions “ the coward of the Élysée “. This publication is then immediately taken up, word for word, a minute later by the Pravda.fr website.
This website and this account have been identified by Viginum, the French service for protection against foreign digital interference, as actors from the Portal Kombat network. A structured disinformation network made up of more than a hundred websites used to disseminate and amplify pro-Russian propaganda online.
The distribution scheme takes place in two stages. False information is first published on a Telegram channel or a social network, before being taken up by a website such as the Pravda ecosystem made up of sites translated into several languages. A path that helps amplify the virality of fake news.
Fake headlines, a major tool of Russian propaganda
This false cover presenting a caricature of Emmanuel Macron is not the first to circulate, far from it. The RFI Info Verif unit has identified more than ten since the start of the war in Ukraine.
This disinformation technique has already targeted several Western media, often satirical magazines. The German TitanicFrench Charlie Hebdo and the Spanish El Jueves are regularly targeted. This propaganda is aimed both at the Russians, whom the Kremlin wants to convince of the merits of its invasion and the crumbling of Western support for Ukraine, and at Westerners.