'Time' did not compare Putin to Hitler on cover of magazine

Fake covers of Time magazine have been doing the rounds on Twitter.

The bogus artwork, which shows a tearaway revealing an image of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler below a picture of Russian president Vladimir Putin, was created by graphic designer Patrick Mulder.

This isn’t the first time Putin has earned a comparison to the infamous dictator. Ukraine’s official Twitter account posted a caricature of Hitler congratulating Putin, and Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations remarked that if Putin wants to “kill himself”, “he doesn’t need to use nuclear arsenal. He has to do what the guy in Berlin did in a bunker in May 1945.”

When the fake Time magazine covers went viral, the fact-checkers at Snopes wrote a piece titled “No, Putin was not compared to Hitler on the cover of Time magazine”. Reuters reporters also debunked the art.

The images became widely popular on social media. News resource The New Voice of Ukraine was also duped as they shared the purported “new cover of Time magazine” with their 109,000 followers.

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Designer Mulder told Snopes: “I never, ever intended for people to think it was real. It was a piece of artwork that many others saved, reposted without mentioning the fact that it was art, not a legitimate cover, and it spread like wildfire.

He added: “I’d never willingly contribute to misinformation, but I stand by the artwork.”

Taking to Twitter yesterday, Mulder said he felt the official Time cover, showing five people in a tank, “was uninspired and lacked conviction”.

In a statement, he wrote: “I wanted to create something that added to the conversation around the invasion of Ukraine and captured the public mood. It wasn't originally intended to be a Time cover. The finished image was so powerful, I felt that it deserved to be framed in an equally powerful way.”

Patrick Mulder/Twitter

He added: “The comparison to Hitler was at the forefront of my mind because Putin is using Hitler’s playbook in his diatribe claiming Ukraine is part of Russia. Hitler said the same thing in Mein Kampf when he insisted Austria should be part of the German motherland. Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine is eerily similar to Hitler’s pretexts for seizing Czechoslovakia and Poland.

He concluded: “I used the image of Hitler because - strategic and ideological comparisons aside - he is the embodiment of evil. Thank you for sharing my art. Slava Ukraini.”

For more Ukraine news, follow The Independent's live blog.

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.