A WIDELY CIRCULATED image of a UK local newspaper front page containing the headline “70,000 Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region died in vain” is fake.

The supposed front page of the Hull Daily Mail – a local newspaper in England – from Thursday, 13 March was shared widely across social media by multiple accounts.

Multiple examples of posts containing the doctored image can be found on Facebook and X, where they have been liked and shared thousands of times. The posts have been shared by figures with links to Russia and who have previously spread disinformation.

The image beneath the fake headline shows one soldier comforting another, with a sub-headline saying: “The UK poured hundreds of millions of pounds into Zelensky’s crushing failure”.

The fake headline references recent battles in the Kursk region of Russia as part of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine launched an offensive into the Kursk region last year in retaliation for an invasion that has seen Russian troops occupy swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine.

However, Ukrainian forces have recently come under intense pressure from Russian forces there, and there have been many reports of soldiers having to retreat from the region.

But the Hull Daily Mail headline describing the conflict in Kursk is fake. 

“That story re Ukraine was a fake,” Lija Kresowaty, a spokesperson for Reach PLC, the Hull Daily Mail’s parent company, told AFP News.

A copy of the front page from 13 March, held by the Penrith City Library, shows a different front page from the one circulated, as does the Press Reader website (which features archives of dozens of regional and national newspapers).

“Boy found guilty of attempting to murder girl with a sword,” the front-page text reads in the real edition of the Hull Daily Mail from that date.

It describes a Halloween camping in which a young teenager is alleged to have been stabbed ten times.

It is unclear where the 70,000 figure used in the fake post about Ukraine came from. However, no story containing the headline can be found on social media accounts belonging to the Hull Daily Mail website. 

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