The Les Echos front page circulating online is a forgery. In the genuine edition of Sept. 7, 2026, that space carries an article about Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The photograph and the text were swapped out, attributing to the French paper statements that appear nowhere on the real front page.
A purported front page of the French business daily Les Echos, showing a smiling Volodymyr Zelensky, is circulating online. The image carries the headline “Des sourires déplacés” (“Misplaced smiles”) and the line “Des rires sur les ossements d’un million d’Ukrainiens morts” — “Laughter on the bones of a million dead Ukrainians”. The forgery is being presented as proof that the French press condemns the Ukrainian president for his conduct while his people are dying.
According to analysis by the monitoring system Osavul, the earliest detected posting of the image appeared on Sept. 8, 2026 in the Telegram channel “Odessa Za Pobedu!”.
A comparison of the circulating image with the genuine Les Echos front page of Sept. 7 shows that it was altered. The paper’s editions are available in its official digital kiosk. In that issue, the space occupied by the photograph of Zelensky carries an article headlined “Allemagne: la percée historique de l’AfD” — “Germany: the historic breakthrough of the AfD” — illustrated with a different photograph. Neither the headline about “misplaced smiles” nor the line about “a million dead Ukrainians” appears anywhere in that block.
Whoever produced the forgery replaced the photograph, the headline and the accompanying text while leaving the rest of the page design untouched: the item on employee savings at the top, the right-hand column, the editorial and the advertisement at the foot of the page. The genuine article about the American envoys in Moscow and Kyiv also remains in place beneath the altered block. Keeping those elements makes the forgery resemble a real edition, but the content of the central item does not match the original.
The claim about “laughter on the bones of a million dead Ukrainians” is therefore not a quotation from Les Echos. The purpose of the forgery is to discredit Volodymyr Zelensky by portraying him as a leader indifferent to the deaths of his own citizens. At the same time, propagandists are creating a false impression among their audience that the French press shares that assessment.
StopFake has previously analyzed a photo fake in which Zelensky supposedly appeared at a meeting in full dress uniform wearing medals.
