How we debunked reports of anti-Zelensky graffiti in a Paris suburb
Did graffiti depicting the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a black hole “absorbing European money” really appear on the streets of a Paris suburb? That’s what a photo that has been circulating on social media since November 29 seems to show. However, our team found no trace of this graffiti at the actual site. Our forensic analysis of the photo shows signs that it was digitally altered. We also consulted some street art experts, who pointed out some inconsistencies in the art.
Issued on:
If you only have a minute…
- Since November 29, 2022, a photo of graffiti depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a black hole eating bank notes has been circulating online.
- Some people have been citing the graffiti, said to have been painted in the Paris suburb of Saint-Mandé, as “proof” that Europeans are growing “more and more frustrated” about the support that their countries are offering to Ukraine – or so say the accounts that have been circulating this photo.
- The photo was first posted on Instagram by an account supposedly run by a Polish street art group. On November 2, the account shared another image of a similar piece of graffiti, this one in Warsaw.
- The FRANCE 24 Observers team went to Saint-Mandé and saw no sign of this graffiti. Our team also contacted the Saint-Mandé city hall, who confirmed that the graffiti had never existed. And we saw no other images or mentions of this graffiti online.
- A specialist also carried out forensic analysis of the photos, which revealed “signs that the photo had been digitally altered”.
- Several street art specialists also cast doubt on the image, revealing inconsistencies between the material supposedly used to create the art and the actual image.
The fact-check, in detail
Did a caricature of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky appear on a street in a Paris suburb? A photo said to show just that has been circulating on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and Telegram since November 29.
The graffiti, painted on the pavement, is a clever trompe-l’oeil making it look like the Ukrainian president’s face is emerging from the pavement, devouring banknotes and gold like a black hole. The photo also seems to show the artist, still working. Next to him is a box of chalk and several cans of spray paint.
In the background of the photo, you can see the entrance of the Saint-Mandé metro station, which is on Line 1.
The photo was first posted on an Instagram account called “typicaloptical” on November 29, 2022. It garnered more than 300 likes.
"Hi, France. Give me all your money. Sorry, not sorry. @zelensky_official", says the caption. The photo was taken on Friday, November 18, 2022.
The image was then posted on Twitter by accounts in English, French and Spanish. These posts, however, got very little traction for the most part.
The images were also shared online by Ramon Fonseca Mora, a politician from Panama and the founder of Mossack Fonseca, a firm specialised in the domiciliation of offshore companies who was a central figure in the Panama Papers scandal.
The post was much more popular in Russian spheres. It was shared on this Telegram channel, which has more than 500,000 followers. There, it garnered more than 70,000 views. It was also posted by this account, which has more than 150,000 followers.
It has also appeared on several Russian news sites, including in this article from November 30, 2022 published by Russian news agency RIA FAN, which Conspiracy Watch has called “a troll factory financed by the Kremlin”.
“European contributors are more and more unsatisfied with the idea of supporting Ukraine. Citizens blame the deterioration of their standard of living on their governments, who are spending large sums of money to maintain the Kyiv regime,” it reads.
No trace of this graffiti
The FRANCE 24 Observers team was able to locate the metro entrance visible in the image, thus enabling us to geolocate the photo to Général Leclerc square in Saint-Mandé, located in the Val-de-Marne region. We visited the site and didn’t see any sign of the graffiti or any evidence that there had been graffiti there at any point.
According to the initial Instagram post from November 29, the graffiti was supposedly created on November 18. Our team spoke to the Saint-Mandé city hall, who told us that this graffiti had never existed.
We also interviewed several shopkeepers who work near the Saint-Mandé metro stop. The five employees of Florangerie, the flower shop that appears in the background of the image, said that they hadn’t seen or heard anything about the graffiti.
There is no trace of this street art elsewhere on the internet either. We carried out searches using a variety of key words (like, for example, “Zelensky Saint-Mandé”) on Google, Twitter and Facebook. However, we didn’t find any other photos showing this graffiti – no images by anyone else, no images from another angle. There were also no media articles documenting it.
Signs of “digital alteration”
Our team showed this image to Dr. Hannes Mareen, a researcher at the IDLab-MEDIA lab at the University of Gand and Imec in Belgium. He carried out a forensic analysis of the image (check out this link to find out how), using the tools MeVer and Invid WeVerify.
While this kind of analysis can’t prove for certain that this image has been altered, it did reveal “signs of digital alteration”. Mareen discovered, for example, that the graffiti has a different resolution than the rest of the image.
Artistic inconsistencies
FRANCE 24 also contacted several specialists in street art, who also pointed out some other inconsistencies in the image.
Guirec Le Verge is the president of an agency called GLV, which specialises in urban visual art. He said:
There are only four canisters of spray paint, meaning the artist seems to be working with just four colours. There are many more colours in the image, however. There are at least three or four different greens, for example, and several shades of yellow.
A member of Graffeur Paris, another agency specialised in street art, also noticed the same thing:
The cans of spray paint are clean, as are [the artist’s] clothes. It’s unlikely that the artist could create this work without getting any paint on his clothes or canisters. The image is also almost too well done to be credible. It’s really rare to have no trace of an error. The lines in the foreground are incredibly smooth, which doesn’t make sense with the texture of the pavement you see elsewhere in the picture.
Both of them estimated that an artist would need at least two days to create a painting like that. So it is hard to imagine that they would be able to do it without being seen.
“Parisian street art is a tiny world. We would have heard about it, there would have been other photos,” Guirec Le Verge said.
Specialists also pointed to the weather.
“If the ground is wet, the paint doesn’t stick,” said Bénédicte Pilet, from the agency Fresh Street Art Paris, which specialises in street art for special events.
There was rain late in the morning and in the evening of November 17 as well as during the evening of November 18, 2022. That means there was a tiny window when the artist could have been working, which would make it nearly impossible to create an image of that size.
A similar piece of graffiti in Warsaw?
This isn’t the first time that a photo of a caricature of the Ukrainian president drawn on the pavement has appeared on social media.
In early November, an image of a similar piece of street art, this one said to be in Warsaw, appeared online. People posted about it in French, in English and in Spanish. The artist is dressed in a similar manner as the person in the Saint-Mandé photo and seems to be using similar canisters of paint. The Ukrainian president is also depicted as a black hole in this image.
Once again, the photo was shared on Telegram (including on journalist Vladimir Soloviev’s channel, which has more than a million followers) and Russian media outlets (like this article from November 3, 2022).
The FRANCE 24 Observers team also showed this image to Dr. Hannes Mareen. Mareen said, just like the image of graffiti in Saint-Mandé, this image also showed “signs of digital alteration”.
This photo was also shared by the same Instagram account that posted the Saint-Mandé photo. The account name is “Typical Optical” and it self-describes as “a not-yet-famous group of artists from Poland”. The group claims to shine “a new ray of light in the kingdom of darkness”. On December 2, 2022, it had just 126 followers.
The media outlet Polish News also debunked rumours that this graffiti appeared in Poland. There was no sign of it in the spot where it was supposed to have been created. Moreover, the city of Warsaw said they hadn’t heard anything about street art of this kind.
Black hole
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, pro-Russian propagandists have shared content on several occasions comparing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a black hole, insinuating that European people were tired of providing help to Ukraine.
For example, the FRANCE 24 Observers team showed that this German cover story depicting Zelensky as a black hole sucking up banknotes and weapons was fake.
This depiction of Zelensky as a “black hole” also has parallels with a fake news item created with images from the American TV channel WDIV on October 17, 2022. Images of Volodymyr Zelensky appear in a montage while the presenters play the sound of a black hole recorded by NASA. The original sequence actually just features a photo of a black hole released by NASA.