Last week I got a call from an out-of-town friend who wanted to know if I’d heard about a Knoxville woman who had been killed in Ukraine. He wanted to know if I recognized the name Rebecca Matserovroski (or something approximating that, since spelling is pretty unstandardized in the countries of the former Soviet Union). He sent me screenshots of foreign language websites announcing her death and told me that published stories claiming she had Knoxville ties presented no proof of her identity beyond the assertion that she was a Ukrainian national who lives here.
Attached to the stories was a photograph of a beautiful young woman in military garb with an American flag patch on her left sleeve. Some of the stories said she was an R.N. who was volunteering as a paramedic with Ukrainian armed forces.
I looked around the internet, made some phone calls and ended up skeptical.
This is Knoxville. If a local woman had been killed in Ukraine, we’d be ringing her family’s doorbell, delivering casseroles and starting a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for her funeral.
One link led me to some Russian bloggers gloating over her demise and hoping she’d been gang raped. It featured the smiling photo of “Rebecca,” and delivered the following message:
“YANKEE REBECCA MACRIOVSKY, WHO FOUGHT IN UKRAINE, HAS BEEN ELIMINATED.
DURING THE SPECIAL OPERATION, US CITIZEN REBECCA MATISROVSKY, WHO FOUGHT ASIDE THE KIEV JUNTA, WAS KILLED.
MESSAGES ABOUT THE ELIMINATION OF THE MERCENARY ARE POSTED BY HIS FRIENDS ON SOCIAL NETWORKS.
I SURE HOPE BEFORE SHE WAS DONE WITH AT LEAST 40 BIGASSES DID THE RIGHT THING.”
My friend said the inconsistent spelling in these reports is not unusual, since Slavic names can take many forms. But women’s names generally end with an “a,” which makes him suspicious that something was wrong with these stories.
“It did originate on Russian blogs and channels first and then Ukrainians picked it up from there but nobody can confirm it I don’t know if anyone in Knoxville even knows who this woman is but what so weird is that if this was something created by the Kremlin why did they choose Knoxville and why did they choose Tennessee?”
He explained that Matserovroski or Matserovroska (or whatever) had allegedly been volunteering as a medic. Neither I nor anybody I contacted about this nor any of my friend’s other Knoxville friends have heard of her.
This piqued my curiosity, so I started making phone calls and scouring the internet. I found reports of her death, but couldn’t find any proof of Knoxville ties, beyond the flat assertion that she lived here. After a couple of days, links I’d saved went dead.
Strange.
Here’s a link with the Knoxville identification that has survived: https://www.urdupoint.com/en/world/state-dept-says-aware-of-reports-us-citizen-1609178.html
My friend warned me that there was something else that is strange about this whole thing – her name is very similar to a Russian word for the misleading, deceitful propaganda that has been a feature of Russian warfare for nearly a century. Was that a sly hint that this is a hoax?
I haven’t been able to find out who the smiling soldier is, but it’s safe to say that her name isn’t Rebecca Matsirovsky (or Macriovsky or whatever), and that she doesn’t live in Knoxville, and probably does not exist outside the warped confines of the Russian propaganda machine. Here is a link to a thread debunking the story. One post suggests that the woman in the picture is from Broomfield, Colorado.
Wherever she’s from, it’s difficult to see how the Russians benefited from this clumsy bit of propaganda, or why they chose to say she was from Knoxville, Tennessee.
Betty Bean writes a Thursday opinion column for KnoxTNToday.com.