The True Story of the “Ghost of Kyiv”

One of the most confusing and controversial news stories of Russia’s ten-week-long invasion of Ukraine is the story of a Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot whose identity—and even reality—has been hotly debated.

Introduction: Meme Magic

The phrase “meme magic” first appeared in the fever swamps of a nihilistic digital bulletin board—4chan—at least a decade ago.

4chan is an anonymous, self-deleting internet village square where (for the most part, at least as to its politically oriented subcommunities) young, white, libertarian or alt-right males go to gleefully use the “c”, “f”, and “n” words without social consequences.

If you have spent time on 4chan without taking a shower immediately afterwards, you have regretted it; as someone who has spent more time on 4chan than I care to admit, doing research connected to my past work teaching digital culture at University of New Hampshire, I can tell you that it’s a soul-crushing cage of human misery. Every minute one spends there is not only a minute whose loss you truly feel but is another stumbling step toward the abyss of hopelessness. 4chan was indisputably the worst collective expression of humanity available to the average American until the advent of MAGA rallies.

But 4chan did give birth to a very interesting phrase—meme magic—even if the idea behind it was one that would be well familiar to philosophers and cultural theorists in the very institutions of higher learning that the 4chan crowd (much like their spiritual predecessors, the alternately anarchistic and neofascist Futurists of the 1910s) despise with aplomb. The core principle here isn’t so complicated: that even ephemeral virtual spaces can produce ideas that are subsequently reified (made “real”) in our collective lived reality (sometimes called meatspace). Perhaps the most infamous example of meme magic is the “OK” hand signal, which 4chan’s users decided to recast as a white power symbol for fun—and it was plausible, too, as the gesture arguably produces a “w” and “p” when made—but quickly saw adopted by actual white supremacists. What had been a mere “meme” was now real; this created a frisson of pleasure among the shadowy young men of 4chan, who irrespective of their views on race continued using the gesture even though they knew it’d been adopted by vile gangs of far-right lunatics.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the 4channers who spend all day on that site’s political discussion board (as opposed to the non-political ones, which are in certain cases actually quite benign) are—to a boy—white supremacists or “merely” alt-right radicals. And in many instances, they are. But for a small subset of 4chan users who are in fact anarchists, libertarians, or, just as commonly, earnestly apolitical, the joy of meme magic is that it reveals the preposterousness of reality. Perhaps these young white men were bored, or experiencing identity crises, or feeling in ways they couldn’t yet express the sudden erosion of their white male privilege, but for some reason the fluidity of meaning and principle exposed by meme magic was almost sexually arousing to many of them when the concept emerged over a decade ago, and remains so today.

This is another way of saying that the notion of meme magic became deeply political.

The boys of 4chan’s early years, some of them now men chronologically if not in any other sense, felt ownership over the special properties of memes in a way that, in time, came to be associated with the alt-right—an article of faith among which movement is that young right-wing extremists today understand and instrumentalize the unique capacities of the internet far better than their leftist counterparts. As I saw in my own sojourns onto 4chan, which admittedly became briefer and briefer over time because I found myself profoundly depressed after each of them, even those 4channers who still don’t identify strongly with any political party jealously guard the now-ingrained idea of “meme magic” as the sole property of America’s political far-right flank.

One reason 4channers took this view of this phenomenon is surely because, for years and years, not only were there no high-profile examples of leftists using meme magic to great effect but because there wasn’t even much indication on America’s political left of any interest in using the internet in this way. Why focus on making real things by creating them first as digital artifacts when you can just interact in healthy, direct ways with people and ideas in meatspace? Indeed there was, by definition, something profoundly anti-social and counter-cultural and subversive about meme magic, which is why those who used it wanted it to be coded as theirs and associated with what they perceived as the lot of white men going forward: to be forcibly herded into that spiky pen known as the “alt-right.”

Then, in late February of 2022, the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” was suddenly born.

The “Ghost of Kyiv”

Understand that fighter pilots often get nicknames, and that while many such pilots get their nicknames before they’ve accomplished anything in battle, others earn them by virtue of their prowess as warriors or as ex post facto recognitions of deeds already done. Understand too that there is always an element of marketing and propaganda in the nicknames pilots receive, just as it’s the case in a college frat that nicknames given to members build a sense of family and a communal identity to display to the world.

All of these protocols are augmented—in both frequency and intensity—in wartime.

In the very early days of Russia’s illegal invasion of its neighbor to the west, Ukraine, a Reddit user wrote of a “Ghost of Kyiv” who’d already become a fighter-pilot “ace” by downing five Russian jets in a real-world hostile-combat scenario. This meme, as was almost certainly intended, spread rapidly, perhaps even beyond the intentions of this particular Reddit user, who around the time a short clip from an aerial-combat video game simulation was being passed around as “footage” of the “Ghost of Kyiv” decided not so much to take back his initial post but push the “pause” button on the whole affair and say he needed to do a bit more research to see if he had the story correct.

Understand that at this point no one really knew where the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” had first originated, only that an anonymous Reddit user appeared to be claiming to have been the first to use it and was now expressing doubts about its usage. Was this Reddit user Ukrainian? A soldier? A government propagandist? An internet troll? No one knew. Was the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” one this person had devised from whole cloth, or first heard elsewhere? No one knew. Regardless of its origin, had the notion of a Ukrainian pilot who had performed heroically in the early days of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine in eight years been organic or contrived? No one knew. Was this Redditor a man or a woman? No one knew, though some unconvincingly said they did.

Indeed, it was as possible that this Reddit user was an American troll concocting a nickname to attach to a real pilot then being widely discussed in Ukrainian military circles as it was that this Redditor was a Ukrainian propagandist spreading a willfully contrived nickname to describe exploits that never occurred. It was, for that matter, equally possible this Redditor was a Venezuelan communist angry at Vladimir Putin for kleptocratically betraying the promise of Vladimir Lenin—in that anger taking and blowing out of proportion an internet rumor she’d actually heard from a usually reliable source—or that she was a Ukrainian refugee seeking to use Russia’s tactics against it via a clever psyops campaign many Americans would see as morally justified.

Again, no one knew.

But the one thing 4channers knew, and that professors of digital culture knew, and for that matter Ukrainian soldiers knew was that it didn’t matter. To be clear, I’m not saying that it didn’t matter because the truth doesn’t matter—the truth is absolutely essential—but because meme magic is as much a real thing for reasons that are benign as those that are morally gray or even risible.

The “Ghost of Kyiv” Was Always Going to Exist

One of the things the world learned within 72 hours of Putin launching his war-crime invasion of Ukraine was that the Russian army is, broadly speaking, incompetent. Not just the Kremlin’s ill-trained, ill-provisioned, and low-morale/high-conscript infantry, either, but its air force, marines, mechanized cavalry, and military leadership. A second thing we learned is that the world’s twenty-second ranked armed forces (Ukraine) can fight like a top-five military when they’re fighting an entirely just war in defense of an illegally encroached-upon homeland. In fact, what the world discovered by the end of February 2022 was that while the Ukrainians were likely outmatched by the Russians, it wasn’t by much, and was only a product of money and manpower, not talent or will.

This is a long way of saying the Ukrainian Air Force (UAF), which is comparatively small and has comparatively old equipment, has now shot down a startling number of Russian fighter jets and attack helicopters—far more than U.S. intelligence expected would be the case, but in any case at a clip now confirmed by intelligence agencies from across the Western world. And these combat victories began very early on—even before the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” had been coined (let alone heard) by anybody.

Needless to say, almost none of these now-confirmed Ukrainian ground-to-air and air-to-air kills were recorded, for the obvious reason that all potential soldier-filmmakers were too busy fighting, and everyone else was too busy hiding. And it took several days for Western-media camera crews to get into position to get significant footage—or even to know where to go to get that footage—and even once they had that capacity, they were often prohibited from getting such footage either by safety concerns or the reasonable request of the Ukrainian armed forces that its positions not be broadcast.

But for all that, someone was downing a lot of Russian aircraft. That much is now clear.

To date, 189 Russian aircraft—at a bare minimum—have been downed by Ukrainians.

Were these 189 Russian aircraft downed by 189 different Ukrainian soldiers, wielding 189 different Stinger missile delivery systems and/or flying 189 different MiG-29s? No one knew, as February slipped into March and March into April. Perhaps, someone somewhere surely thought to themselves, those 189 jets and helicopters were downed by 183 different Ukrainian soldiers; or 181 different Ukrainian soldiers; or 176, or 174? There must have been some loose conjecture amidst the mystery; humans are like that.

So is it possible, given the miniscule size of Ukraine’s air force, the limited number of missions it runs daily (about ten, per major media reports) and the more-than-likely fact that many of the Russian aircraft lost so far have been jets that a single Ukrainian pilot managed, by March 13 of 2022—19 days into the war—to down enough Russian aircraft (five) to be officially named a “flying ace” under the conventions of modern warfare? Of course it’s possible. Frankly, in a certain view it doesn’t even seem unlikely.

Who Decides If—or When—the “Ghost of Kyiv” Exists?

Given the fog of war, the identity of any individual Ukrainian pilot who shot down any individual Russian jet or helicopter was always going to be a piece of news revealed to the world, if it were to be revealed at all, by Ukraine’s military—and almost certainly by members of the Ukrainian military speaking to members of Ukraine’s press corps.

It goes without saying that the Kremlin has never once been honest with the world or even its own people about the cost it is paying for Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine; and it’s equally clear there are far more Ukrainian journalists on the ground in Ukraine (particularly in the hottest hot spots for shelling and live small arms fire) than there are U.S. or other Western journalists. So if it were to come to pass that one Ukrainian were responsible for five of 189 downed Russian aircraft—a not unimaginable outcome—that intelligence was almost certain to come from a Ukrainian source and be given to, in turn, a Ukrainian source.

Indeed, given that we know which Ukrainian news sources are the most respected and have the most journalists on the ground in Ukraine, we could probably have predicted in advance that if it came to pass that one Ukrainian had been responsible for just five of the 189 downed Russian aircraft in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’d likely hear about it from the Kyiv Post.

But there were other things about a scenario of this sort that we could’ve predicted in advance:

1. The Ukrainians would give any such “flying ace” a nickname—because such aces always get nicknames;

2. the Ukrainians would use a nickname first created outside Ukraine if it seemed more to the Ukrainian military’s advantage to do so;

3. the Ukrainians wouldn’t hesitate to issue a nickname to such a flying ace after the fact, because nicknames for such persons are often given after the fact;

4. no matter what had actually happened with respect to such a Ukrainian ace, the Kremlin—and its far-right allies in the United States—would insist that it had not happened, if they felt it to be to their benefit to falsely say so; and

5. the young white men on 4chan and Reddit would be annoyed if they felt that the Ukrainians had used for their new ace a nickname that they (the young white men) had created, as irrespective of the politics of these young men—whether they’re white supremacists, alt-right, Trumpists, old-school Republican Party adherents, libertarians, apolitical, or anarchists—they do not like the idea of “meme magic” being used by anyone but them, and (if they hail from any of the first three political philosophies above) they especially do not want Ukraine using their digital work-product to the detriment of their heroes in the Kremlin.

And yet the core facts remained: the Ukrainian military was always going to control the identification of a Ukrainian “ace” in the first instance; it was always going to be almost impossible to confirm or deny such a claim by Ukraine’s military; Ukrainian journalists would likely be first to report such a claim being made by the Ukrainian military; and the Ukrainian military was going to use whatever name for its ace best served the purposes of the Ukrainian military, regardless of from where that name had originated.

“Debunking” Is Only Sometimes a Thing

When news of an alleged “Ghost of Kyiv” first spread like wildfire across the internet in late February of 2022, the 4chan and Reddit crowd were also the quickest to say that it had been “debunked.” That’s odd, isn’t it? Why would the world’s foremost and most gleeful meme warriors be the first to throw cold water on the use of a phrase they said they had devised? And what exactly were they saying had been “debunked”? By whom?

Were they saying no Ukrainian pilot had downed at least five Russian planes in the war’s first days? No, they weren’t—they’d no basis to speak on that one way or another.

Were they saying the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” had first appeared on Reddit, before it’d ever appeared anywhere else? No, they weren’t—because while they suspected that might be true, they didn’t know for sure, and even the Redditor in question was vague on this point. They may have suspected the term was a Reddit byproduct, but they didn’t know.

Were they saying they knew the identity of the Redditor who wrote of the “Ghost of Kyiv” on Reddit? Perhaps some were; perhaps some felt they knew the real identity of that pseudonymous Redditor, and that this was some sort of conclusive resolution of the matter—but the public at large certainly had no reason to trust the identification of a pseudonymous Redditor, and would naturally presume (rightly so) that they could be anyone or anything, from Ukrainian to American, from soldier to internet troll.

Were they saying that the Ukrainians were legally estopped from using the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” to nickname any Ukrainian pilot—before the fact, during the fact, or after the fact? Of course not; that’d be ridiculous. Indeed, not only did they realize that the Ukrainian military could nickname one of its pilots “the Ghost of Kyiv” if it wanted to, they knew that the Ukrainian armed forces had every right (and one might even say, from a winning-the-war standpoint, every responsibility) to use that moniker for anyone it wanted to in its air force, whether or not they’d earned the ace title or not.

For instance, say a single Ukrainian pilot had engaged in a single heroic act that the Ukrainian air force deemed to have saved a hundred Kyiv residents’ lives. Could it dub him or her “the Ghost of Kyiv”? Absolutely. And the appellation would be deserved in a fashion consistent with its Reddit usage: a Ukrainian pilot who’d acted so heroically that he could rightly be said to be a leading protector of Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv.

So what would debunking even mean in the context of “the Ghost of Kyiv”? It’s unclear.

The Alt-Right—and Russia—Get Their Comeuppance

Invariably, if the notion of “meme magic” has some real-world purchase—and it does—it was inevitable it would escape the hothouse of 4chan or (for that matter) Reddit.

And it was equally inevitable that it would escape the control of the young white men who insist they birthed it.

And it was equally inevitable it would at some point be weaponized by the political left, or at least some entity associated with (and/or simply cheered on by) the political left.

For instance—as now—the Ukrainian military.

But in saying that meme magic can be weaponized, we must understand, again, that it’s not in itself a nefarious—let alone fraudulent—phenomenon. The virtual world is now so inextricably entwined with our collective meatspace that it’s actually a bit of a yawner (in a way it wasn’t more than a decade ago) to observe that something first popularized in a virtual space can ultimately manifest and crystallize in a physical one.

In fact, far more surprising than the idea that “the Ghost of Kyiv” would come to exist in the person of an actual Ukrainian soldier is that anyone who understands meme magic would think they could ever stop that from happening. While it wasn’t assured that internet trolls in a digital hothouse could turn a once-innocuous hand signal into a gesture now recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as potential hate speech—putting aside for a moment how sick a person you have to be to want your one contribution while here on Earth to be that, of all things—it was 100% guaranteed that a Ukrainian hero would emerge during the Russia-Ukraine war and that he or she would not only be given a nickname but that that nickname would then become a meme.

If you told me that some of the most talented (if unscrupulous) meme-makers in the world would draw up that nickname in advance, and do such a good job of it that it would immediately become “meme magic,” I’d say: “Well, they’ve done it before, and against much longer odds, so why not? They can make ‘the Ghost of Kyiv’ real—as in actually, tangibly, confirmably, and indisputably a real person—if they want to do so.”

Again, the only sad thing about all this is that these coy meme-makers—if indeed they wrote the first draft of history, here, and I don’t know one way or another if that’s so—apparently understand so little about what they’re doing that they cannot distinguish between a situation in which their work is “debunkable” and one in which it’s certain to evolve into successful “meme magic” no matter what it was they originally intended.

Boys Who Cry “Ghost” Cry Foul When a Ghost Appears

As we all could have expected, the Kyiv Post—and The Times of London (article) and many other media outlets, including even the conservative New York Post—are now reporting that “the Ghost of Kyiv” was indeed a real Ukrainian soldier: specifically, Major Stepan Tarabalka of the Ukrainian Air Force. Tarabalka was killed on March 13, 2022, after downing as many as 40 Russian aircraft. The source for these reports is, again as expected, the Ukrainian military; indeed, the report indicates Maj. Tarabalka has been given Ukraine’s highest posthumous honors by current Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

And as we all could have expected, the alt-right and other Kremlin allies are now livid.

Can they say that Tarabalka wasn’t a hero? No, he clearly he was, and even if he shot down 35 fewer Russian aircraft than reports now say—87.5% fewer than now reported—he’s still officially a flying “ace.”

Can they say Tarabalka isn’t “the Ghost of Kyiv”? No, he clearly is, as it’s in the UAF’s sole discretion to mythologize its hero pilots, and it long ago decided on this nickname.

Can they say that no one’s allowed to use the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” without their permission? No, that’s silly, and—not for nothing—much prissier than internet trolls usually allow themselves to be caught out as.

Can they even say the Ukrainian military stole the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” from them? No, and in fact this very notion is equally silly, as it’s been in the very nature of these alt-right actors to move about the internet untraceably and pseudonymously for over a decade now—so they’ve no standing (or even capacity) to prove that they were responsible for the “first” usage of a popular phrase, and indeed lack even the ability to identify with precision any of the members of their camp who may have been the originators of a particular phrase. They have, in this sense, been hoisted on their own petard. For all the interesting articles on the Know Your Meme website, even that site doesn’t call itself journalism: it makes the best approximation it can of where a given word or phrase may have first appeared, but it knows (and we know) this is like trying to catch light in a bottle. The most we can do is approximate what may have happened.

And it’s in the nature of may or could to be quickly displaced and eclipsed by did and is.

So, with that said, this is Stepan Tarabalka, who is the Ghost of Kyiv—period, full stop.

ABOVE: Posthumously decorated UAF pilot Maj. Stepan Tarabala (KIA, 3/13/22).

The Backlash

Those of us on the political left have long observed on the political right a strong lean into projection—that is, accusing your adversary of harboring your own weaknesses.

It’s in this spirit that political leftists have regularly remarked upon the staggeringly sad snowflakery of the right; there’s a penchant for victimhood, whining, and tone-deaf self-pity on the right that wasn’t nearly as pronounced prior to the ascendance of the American politician who is now (and likely forever) most associated with all three of victimhood, whining, and tone-deaf self-pity: Donald Trump, by far the most fragile supposedly “successful” person ever to grace an American debate stage or television.

So it’s little surprise that the revelation of the Ghost of Kyiv would receive a backlash from those Americans who are rooting—sometimes openly, sometimes subtly—for their other hero, Putin, to erase Ukraine and its people from the very face of the Earth.

What could not have been expected was the lameness of the current backlash.

Earlier today—on Saturday, April 30, 2022—a journalist at the Kyiv Independent, a decent media outlet that’s nevertheless substantially less well-known or revered than the Kyiv Post, tweeted one paraphrased statement that he claims comes from the UAF (“Ukraine’s Air Force asks [sic] to stop producing stupid fake stories”) and another statement that clearly comes from this journalist, Illia Ponomarenko, personally (“Pilot Serhiy Tarabalka was not ‘the Ghost of Kyiv’ and he did not have 40 (!!) air victories. He was killed in combat on March 13. ‘The Ghost of Kyiv’ is a meme, a collective image of all Ukrainian fighter pilots.”).

Ponomarenko followed up these unsourced statements with an image of a series of sentences; the sentences in the image Ponomarenko posted on Twitter are undated, unsigned, untranslated, and uncorroborated. As they’re in the Ukrainian language (I believe) and an image format not transferable to Google Translate, almost no one on Twitter who’s shared them has any idea whatsoever what they say. And of course, even if—translated—they convey something along the lines of Ponomarenko’s opinion on the Ghost of Kyiv, the fact that they’re undated and unsigned and uncorroborated and contradict reporting from respected media outlets means that they cannot be deemed journalistic work-product at this point in any case. They have, nevertheless, gone viral.

Predictably, Kremlin allies in the United States and around the world are using this bizarre tweet as a “debunking” of published reports from the Kyiv Post, the Times of London, the New York Post, and other media outlets around the world. If there were any doubt that the Kremlin’s allies don’t understand what debunking means, their attempt to dub a Twitter image of unknown provenance and a tweet by a journalist whose name and employer they’d never heard before today a firm debunking confirms their ailment.

Fortunately, the published and vetted reports of well-known media outlets have been translated, are dated, do cite sources, and stand as the “story as we know it” until any of them are retracted—which, as of this writing, has not happened even a single time.

So here’s what we get from the sources noted and linked to below and several others:

(1) The media outlets fully acknowledge what was previously understood about this story. As the Kyiv Post writes, the notion of there being a Ghost of Kyiv was “believed to be an urban legend and thought to be promoted by Ukrainian authorities as a morale boost for Ukrainian forces.” That the Post, Ukraine’s paper of record, would acknowledge this fact lends significant credibility to its new reporting, as it indicates that its reporters and editors were well aware, before publishing a report on the name and exploits of the Ghost of Kyiv, that they had to be certain they weren’t spreading either an urban legend or war-time propaganda.

(2) There is new data about the accomplishments of Major Tarabalka. The initial Reddit meme about the Ghost of Kyiv—which is not to say the first mention of that phrase, as we can’t know when that was or what its provenance was—came in late February, and indicated that a Ukrainian pilot had downed “four or five” Russian aircraft. The new report covers a substantially longer period of time—through the mid-March death of Major Tarabalka—and says reports indicate the Ghost of Kyiv shot down around “40 Russian aircraft” total. This is new casualty data, covering a new timeframe.

(3) The Kyiv Post cites numerous sources for its reporting. While American and Russian allies of the Kremlin are falsely claiming that all the current reporting on Major Tarabalka comes from the well-respected Times of London (UK), this is false. As the Post notes, “various Ukrainian media” first received reports from the Ukrainian military this week that it (the Ukrainian armed forces) deemed Tarabalka to be the Ghost of Kyiv, with these reports including a brief statement on the hero’s March 13 death by the Ukrainian Defense Military (which, it goes without saying, doesn’t put out press releases about every Ukrainian casualty, let alone acknowledge the names of every individual soldier who has performed bravely on the battlefield).

(4) President Zelensky himself acknowledged Major Tarabalka as the Ghost of Kyiv, and did so in a way suggesting the acknowledgment wasn’t for propaganda purposes. Today is April 30, 2022; had President Zelensky wanted to fraudulently use a soldier who hadn’t actually distinguished himself in any way as a false symbol of hope for his people, he wouldn’t have posthumously awarded Major Tarabalka the Order of the Golden Star and the title of Hero of Ukraine on March 20—as he did—and then not spoken about it for nearly a month and a half afterward despite giving literally scores of interviews with both domestic and international press looking hungrily for a story of precisely this sort. Indeed, even if the current UAF statement is as Ponomarenko now describes it (and we have no basis to judge that one way or another), it would actually dovetail with Zelensky’s reticence in lionizing Tarabalka over his comrades; one could understand the UAF wanting the phrase “Ghost of Kyiv” not to reside in the deceased body of a single soldier but to infuse the entirety of Ukraine’s armed forces with hope.

That Zelensky, commander-in-chief of the very UAF Ponomarenko says is unhappy with the current discussion of Tarabalka, acknowledged him privately but not publicly 50 days ago may even suggest Zelensky agrees that two things can be simultaneously true: (a) Major Tarabalka was the Ghost of Kyiv, and (b) there’s no utility in spreading that phrase anymore because it attaches to someone the Russian military ultimately killed—and the focus of those Ukrainians still alive and fighting should be on their own unity, hope, and purpose. This would be a very hard position to argue with, even if it still leaves us, indisputably, with Major Stepan Tarabalka as the Ghost of Kyiv.

(5) There are other indicators of a general acceptance, in Ukraine and now around the world, that Major Tarabalka was the Ghost of Kyiv. Ukraine’s military, which again didn’t rush to announce Tarabalka’s death or accomplishments or nickname, has apparently agreed to let Tarabalka’s “helmet and goggles” be auctioned in London, which public auction requires (as all auctions do) pre-certification of the provenance, authenticity, and context of the items to be auctioned off. It would be impossible for these items to have been transported from Kyiv to London in this way and for this purpose absent prior confirmation by Ukrainian officials of both Tarabalka’s identity and his heroism.

(6) No one doubts that Tarabalka was a real Ukrainian pilot, and the reports tell us more about him. We know that he was an “Ivano-Frankivsk regional native”; that he died, as noted, in a dogfight with Russian pilots on March 13, 2022; that he was married, and that his widow’s name is Olena; that he has an eight year-old son; and that his combat exploits were well enough understood inside the Ukrainian military that he was able to receive the highest military honors Ukraine can bestow on a soldier killed in action within seven days of his death. Given that the Ukrainian Air Force has now acknowledged Tarabalka’s identity and heroism, undoubtedly many more biographical details on the man will soon follow. Indeed, other reports on him have already published certain such details, but for the sake of brevity here (and due to the fact that you can easily Google these details) I won’t offer any additional ones here.

(7) Even the Ukrainian Air Force’s new “denials” that Tarabalka was the Ghost of Kyiv aren’t real denials. The Times of London, adding to its original story, reports that “Yuriy Ignat, an air force spokesman, dismissed claims that Tarabalka was the man behind the legend. He said: ‘The Ghost of Kyiv is alive and embodies a collective image of the highly qualified pilots of the tactical aviation brigade successfully defending Kyiv and the surrounding region.’” Intending no disrespect whatsoever—and indeed only honor—for Ignat, a soldier who is now in the midst of a fight for the survival of his country, his goal in issuing this statement to the British media is clear: to ensure that the optimism and pride born of the exploits of the Ghost of Kyiv does not die with the man who inspired (even if ex post facto) that phrase. It would be seen as a Russian propaganda victory, surely, for the UAF to admit that Russian forces killed the Ghost of Kyiv, which is why one can understand—without also accepting—Ignat’s counter-propaganda indicating that “The Ghost of Kyiv is alive and embodies a collective image of the highly qualified pilots of [Ukraine]…[who are] successfully defending Kyiv…” What else would we expect the UAF to say? Ignat has said the right thing for his fellow soldiers and for the Ukrainian military.

But it is equally clear that Ignat is cleaning up the public relations disaster left behind by the UAF’s initial acknowledgment that, internally, the UAF did view Tarabalka as the Ghost of Kyiv—not for propaganda purposes (else they would have publicized him and his exploits at the time they were occurring) but due to his many accomplishments.

(8) There are now so many reports about Tarabalka that it’s clear that the Times of London wasn’t “on an island” in its reporting. Many Kremlin allies are now wrongly saying that the Times of London published its report as a way of pushing the auction of Tarabalka’s helmet and goggles. This is a vile—and if you think about it for even a moment, preposterous—untruth. There are now so many reports on Maj. Tarabalka’s exploits, and so many different Ukrainian military sources cited for these reports, that the idea of a single-source story has crossed over into willful Kremlin propaganda.

Consider this article, which credits Tarabalka with ten confirmed kills on the first day of Russia’s invasion (which fact alone would confirm that the tweet by the Ukrainian government posted 72 hours later, see below, was grounded in fact, not propaganda); or this one, which unambiguously attributes the 40-kill figure to Ukraine’s military and states equally unambiguously that a Ukrainian military source identified Tarabalka—by name—as the Ghost Of Kyiv. While the initial Times of London report included much information, and has now been augmented with sad but necessary denials from the Ukrainian Air Force, it’s clear that when the Kyiv Post said “various” Ukrainian outlets had received the same intelligence as the Times of London, it meant exactly that.

{Note: To be clear, I intend no disrespect to Illia Ponomarenko, who is clearly trying to keep up the morale of his countrymen and honor the current wishes of the UAF—which require it to deny Tarabalka’s accomplishments and whitewash the legend he engendered. It is sad that Ponomarenko’s words will now be used as propaganda by his and Ukraine’s mortal enemies.}

Conclusion: The Ghost of Kyiv

In the coming days and weeks—despite reports on the identity of the Ghost of Kyiv, beyond those media outlets cited above, by the likes of Business Insider (link), NDTV (link), The Hill (link), CBS News Radio (link) and countless others—there undoubtedly will be attempts to walk back the Ghost of Kyiv story by both ardent Kremlin allies and Ukrainians who worry Tarabalka’s death could be demoralizing, an odd situation in which both sides of a military conflict must share the same view of a single report.

But let us be clear: the Ukrainian government, from the very start, agreed that it had individual pilots whose exploits in the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war were so stunning, numbers-wise, that they were deserving of the appellation Ghost of Kyiv:

Ukraine / Україна @Ukraine

People call him the Ghost of Kyiv. And rightly so — this UAF ace dominates the skies over our capital and country, and has already become a nightmare for invading Russian aircrafts.

Per the UAF, Maj. Tarabalka had at least ten confirmed kills as of this tweet’s posting.

Ukraine then kept Tarabalka’s identity secret—for his own safety and the safety of his family, according to Business Insider and others. And when he died just two weeks after the tweet above, his death, as noted above, was hidden by Ukraine’s military because it could’ve easily become a propaganda victory for a then (and still) demoralized Russian army. And because the story of the Ghost of Kyiv still carries a similar potential—to demoralize the very Ukrainians in whom it once inspired hope—the Ukrainians must do something they surely would’ve never wanted to do and understate Maj. Tarabalka’s accomplishments.

ABOVE: An excerpt from the April 30, 2022 Business Insider report on Tarabalka.

To do otherwise—to take the same position on these accomplishments that the whole of the Ukrainian government took on March 20, when no one was watching (which is when journalists tend to think people are being their most honest)—is to risk turning Tarabalka into an albatross rather than a rallying cry. In short, Ukraine must deny a man’s life to honor him appropriately in death, and this fact will undoubtedly be used by U.S. and Russian charlatans in the days and weeks ahead to erase what cannot now be erased: that on March 20, when no one was watching, President Zelensky gave the highest honors it was within his power to bestow upon an unknown Ukrainian pilot whose exploits Ukraine was at the time doing nothing publicly or privately to highlight.

While we don’t know where in the range of five to 40 air-to-air kills Tarabalka’s career ended, we know it was an astounding enough figure that it earned the highest honors Ukraine can given to any fallen soldier. And that fallen soldier was the Ghost of Kyiv—may his memory live on as a lit beacon to all the men and women fighting for Ukraine.

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