They lived in an abandoned house in a forest next to a small village. They survived on mushrooms and berries. It took months after the Russian army retreated for the Ukrainian police to capture them.
The tale of six abandoned Russian soldiers was told by at least four Ukrainian news media outlets and countless people on social media last week. It turned out to be baseless, but it provided a recent vivid example of how wartime rumors in Ukraine spread quickly.
Vitaliy Romas, a former mayor of Dernivka, a village just east of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where the soldiers were supposed to have been holed up, received more than 30 phone calls in a single day. The police, military, journalists and people who were just curious called to ask about the supposed capture of the six Russians, he said.