The statement came after several outlets published stories misidentifying the commander Stephan Tarabalka as the person behind the legend. Tarabalka was a royal pilot who died on March 13 during a dogfight and was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of Ukraine, the Air Force explained last month, the AP agency reported.
“The information about the death of the Ghost of kyiv is incorrect,” the Air Force wrote in another Twitter post that day.
“The Phantom Of kyiv is alive, it embodies the collective spirit of the pilots highly-skilled fighters from the Tactical Aviation Brigade who are successfully defending kyiv and the region.”
The legend began the day after Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, when social media users began spreading accounts, without evidence, of an anonymous pilot who had shot down several Russian planes single-handedly.
On February 25, the former president Petro Poroshenko tweeted a photo shared three years earlier by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry falsely claiming it showed the skilled pilot had shot down six enemy aircraft.
Two days later, Ukraine’s official Twitter account shared a video containing the same photo, with images of fighter jets in action, epic music, and the caption: “People call him the Ghost of kyiv. And rightly so: this FAU ace dominates the skies over our capital and the country, and has already become a nightmare for the invading Russian planes.”
Source: Ambito
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