The three U.S. soldiers named by Russia’s Pravda newspaper as “mercenaries” killed in a recent attack on the Yavoriv International Center for Peacekeeping and Security near the Polish border are very much alive, according to the Tennessee National Guard. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine had given military rankings and vivid descriptions of alleged items found next to their corpses, which included dog tags and a Tennessee state flag, even though the men are not in Ukraine. “They are accounted for, safe and not, as the article headline erroneously states, U.S. mercenaries killed in Donetsk People’s Republic,” the Tennessee Guard said in a statement.

It is not clear if the troops were part of a wider training operation that ended when President Joe Biden pulled all Americans out of Ukraine four weeks ago, prior to the invasion, but all three men had at one time served in the now war-torn nation. An official told Reuters that two of the named men were still in Tennessee and the third, who had left the National Guard, was not in Ukraine. The Guard spokesman said Russians chose the three names from a 2018 deployment roster published by Tennessee’s 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment to Ukraine. “All members of the Tennessee National Guard returned safely to their home state in 2019 after a successful mission,” the U.S. National Guard confirmed.