Russian propaganda claimed a girl was ‘rescued’ from ‘liberated’ Kostiantynivka. She had been far from the front for weeks.

Russian propaganda has been pushing a story about the rescue of a 10-year-old girl from Kostiantynivka, a city in the Donetsk region that Vladimir Putin was told Russian forces had fully captured in early July — though Ukraine says the city remains under Ukrainian military control. The independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo found a hole in the account: the girl appears to have been far from the front line for at least a month before reports of her “rescue” surfaced.

On July 8, Zvezda, the Russian Defense Ministry’s television channel, reported on a 10-year-old girl named Sofia who had allegedly been hiding alone in a basement on the outskirts of Kostiantynivka. “She said her mother had died, she doesn’t remember her father, and her grandparents, who were wounded when a Ukrainian drone struck their home, are also dead,” Zvezda reported. According to the channel, Russian soldiers guarded the house where Sofia was hiding for nearly a month, brought her food, and evacuated her as soon as they were able.

Z-bloggers picked up the story as well. Posts about Sofia appeared in the Telegram channels of Sergei Zenin, Yevgeny Poddubny, Andrei Rudenko, and Alexander Kots — all written in roughly the same way, all emphasizing that Sofia’s grandparents had been killed specifically by a Ukrainian drone.

The story then appeared on the evening news of Channel One and the state news agency TASS. TASS published a 15-minute interview with Sofia that was laced with Russian propaganda narratives:

Russia’s children’s ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova announced on July 9 that Sofia was “temporarily housed in a children’s facility” in the annexed “DNR” while officials searched for her relatives. Agentstvo determined that the girl had most likely been placed in a social rehabilitation center for minors in the city of Shakhtarsk — controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (“DNR”) since 2014 — and that she had been there since at least early June.

On June 5, the website of the “DNR” Labor Ministry reported on how Pushkin Day was celebrated at the social center in Shakhtarsk. The post included photographs of children from the center; among them is a girl in a light blue T-shirt who resembles Sofia. A facial comparison tool used by Agentstvo rated their similarity at nearly 100%. The same girl appears in photos the center posted on VK on June 29, July 2, and July 3.

The social rehabilitation center for minors in Shakhtarsk houses children who have found themselves “in difficult circumstances.” When and why the girl who resembles Sofia ended up there is unknown. It is also unclear whether her name is actually Sofia or whether she previously lived in Kostiantynivka. Even if Russian propaganda did not fabricate her evacuation, it presented the story as a timely account of a “rescue” from a “liberated” city while concealing the fact that the girl at the center of the story had already been living dozens of kilometers from the front line for at least a month.