A photograph of the cover of TIME magazine, which shows Russian President Vladimir Putin's image juxtaposed with Adolf Hitler, has been shared on social media as the magazine's new cover.
This comes as Russia and Ukraine have been involved in a fierce battle since 24 February, when the former invaded Ukraine. This ignited a conversation with several people comparing Putin with Hitler.
However, we found that the cover image that is doing the rounds is fake and was created by one 'Patrick Mulder'.
He later clarified saying that, "I wanted to create something that added to the conversation around the invasion of Ukraine and captured the public mood" and added that it was intended to be a TIME cover but he felt 'a powerful image deserved a powerful frame'.
CLAIM
The cover was shared by 'The New Voice of Ukraine', an independent news resource. The tweet had garnered over 1500 retweets and more than 4800 likes at the time of writing this story.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We noticed that the cover which was being shared by everyone carried a watermark at the bottom which read 'By Patrick Mulder'.
On looking for Mulder on Twitter, we came across his profile and a tweet from 26 February where he had shared the artwork.
He shared the cover and wrote, "My rework of this month's TIME magazine cover." However, this cover is different from the one which is being shared. Instead of the moustache, it showed a Nazi symbol on Putin's forehead.
Then on 27 February, he shared another cover which is now being shared as the 'new TIME cover'. Though this time, it wasn't clearly mentioned that it is a reworked cover.
Mulder, however, put out a statement the next day clarifying that his artwork had gone viral as the cover of TIME magazine.
He wrote, "The image is one out of a sequence of three I created on the day Russia invaded Ukraine. I felt the official cover by TIME was uninspired and lacked conviction. I wanted to create something that added to the conversation around the invasion of Ukraine and captured the public mood."
WHAT ABOUT THE ORIGINAL TIME COVER?
We also looked at the TIME Vault, which houses all the covers of the magazine, and saw that none of the covers remotely resembled the one being shared online.
We found the latest magazine cover 'How Putin shattered Europe’s dreams' on their Twitter account. The text of this cover was retained to make the design, which is now viral.
The dateline was, however, of the previous cover. Evidently, an artwork was shared as an original TIME magazine cover.
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