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AN IMAGE PURPORTING to show the front cover of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, featuring a bruised and beaten looking caricature of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a boxing ring, is fake.
The fake image has been circulating widely online, where it has been shared across social media platforms. One post on Facebook featuring the image received over 1,400 likes and was shared over 150 times.
The image is in the style of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which publishes a weekly edition.
It shows a caricature of a bruised Zelenskyy in the corner of a boxing ring, bleeding into a tin bucket. He is flanked by caricatures of what look like French president Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
All three caricatures have speech bubbles with French text inside of them. Zelenskyy’s bubble states: “Putin is definitely afraid of me”.
Macron says: “You look in great shape”, while Merz says: “You are about to win”.
The image shows that the issue is dated 15 May 2025, and is number 1713.
However, the cover image is fake and was never released by Charlie Hebdo.
There is no record of such a cover appearing on the Charlie Hebdo website. The latest issue of the magazine is dated 21 May 2025, and features a separate cover.
Charlie Hebdo is a weekly magazine, and the issue before that is dated 14 May 2025, and again features a different cover with an illustration of French Prime Minister François Bayrou.
The issues themselves are numbered 1712 and 1713 respectively. The fake issue being numbered 1713 does not correspond with the edition on the magazine’s website.
As well as this, Charlie Hebdo is published on Wednesdays, not Thursdays. So it would not be published on 15 May – which was a Thursday.
There is also no record of the cover on the magazine’s official social media accounts (Facebook and X).
The Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation (part of the country’s National Security and Defense Council) also released a statement saying that the cover is fake:
❗️A fake cover of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is being widely circulated on the social media platform X, showing the President of Ukraine depicted as a beaten boxer. pic.twitter.com/F1sNaqKXJA
— Center for Countering Disinformation (@CforCD) May 20, 2025
Finally, a review of all the covers in 2025 of Charlie Hebdo, shows no such cover appearing.
It is clear from the above evidence that no legitimate cover of Charlie Hebdo exists.
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