But on Saturday, Ukrainian authorities acknowledged that the legendary pilot was a myth. “The Ghost of Kiev is a superhero legend whose character was created by Ukrainians!” The Ukrainian Air Force said in Ukrainian on Facebook. The statement came after many media outlets published stories that mistakenly identified Major Stepan Tarambalka as the man behind the nickname. Tarabalka was a real pilot who died on March 13 during an air battle and was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Air Force said last month. But it was not the ghost of Kiev, the force said in a statement on Saturday. “Information about the death of The Ghost of #Kyiv is incorrect,” the Ukrainian Air Force wrote in a separate post on Twitter on Saturday. “#GhostOfKyiv is alive and well, embodying the collective spirit of the highly qualified Air Force Brigade pilots who successfully defend #Kievo and the region.”
“A nightmare for the invasion of Russian aircraft”
The legend came just a day after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, as social media users began spreading unsubstantiated allegations about an anonymous fighter pilot who had shot down several Russian planes on his own. Mimics, irrelevant photos, and even footage from a flight simulator video game have surfaced on social media, claiming to show the Ghost of Kiev during the battle. On February 25, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko posted on Twitter a photo released by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry three years earlier, falsely claiming to show the Ghost of Kiev, which shot down six Russian pilots. Two days later, Ukraine’s official Twitter account shared a video with the same image, along with footage of fighter jets in battle, with pulsating music, with the caption: “People call him the ghost of Kiev. And rightly so – “This UAF ace dominates the skies over the capital and our country and has already become a nightmare for the invasion of Russian aircraft.” The same day, Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, shared the same old photo on the Telegram – but now claims to have shot down 10 fighter jets. When news outlets, including the Times of London, falsely identified the pilot as Tarabalka on Friday, reports had raised the ghost number to 40. The Times later updated their story to reflect the air force’s new position in Ghost of Kyiv.
