'Ukraine without access to the sea and parts of its western territories': Russian propaganda creates fake map attributed to The New York Times

Fabricated scenario is being circulated against the backdrop of peace talks to convince audiences that Ukraine's future has supposedly already been "decided" without its participation.

Russian accounts on Instagram, Facebook, X and Telegram are circulating a map of Ukraine that supposedly shows how its territory could change after the end of the war.

The propaganda posts claim that the U.S. newspaper The New York Times has allegedly revealed Moscow's future demands that it will present to U.S. President Donald Trump as part of a peace deal on Ukraine. They allegedly include changing Ukraine's borders, limiting the size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and abandoning its bid for NATO membership. To support these claims, the distributors are sharing a map they present as a New York Times article.

The map shows large parts of central, eastern and southern Ukraine as supposedly set to come under Russian control, including territories in the Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions. Some western territories, meanwhile, are marked as supposedly set to be transferred to Poland, Hungary and Romania.

The posts also claim that the alleged "peace deal" would require reducing the size of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and Ukraine abandoning its bid to join NATO.

This is fake. Our team found no such map among The New York Times' materials on Russia's war against Ukraine or on the news outlet's official social media accounts. Searches using distinctive labels and descriptions of the map also found no NYT article confirming its origin.

The map shows signs of digital manipulation and contains numerous graphic and cartographic anomalies. In particular, the outlines of some territories do not correspond to the actual boundaries of Ukrainian regions, while some labels are distorted or illegible. Such features may be characteristic of synthetically generated or edited images. However, the image alone does not make it possible to reliably determine whether generative AI was used to create it.

The map's design also casts doubt on its claimed origin: all the key labels are in Italian ("Polonia," "Ungheria," "Romania," "Nuova Russia," "Mar Nero"), even though the map is attributed to the U.S. outlet The New York Times.

The circulation of this map bears signs of a Russian information operation aimed at creating a perception of Ukraine's "inevitable territorial defeat." The fake map not only exaggerates Ukraine's possible territorial losses but also creates the false impression that its Western allies are supposedly prepared to agree to the partition of Ukrainian territory.

The fake is being circulated against the backdrop of peace-process negotiations and visits to Kyiv and Moscow by U.S. President Donald Trump's representatives, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.

Russian propaganda previously spread fake claims about food shortages in Ukraine.

Andrii Olenin