Then the questions started to pop up. The pro-Russian separatists — who with the aid of the Russian Army routed the Ukrainians in battles in August,
taking many captives — released men appearing to be actual prisoners of war.

The Ukrainians, however, widely understood to be lacking enough prisoners of their own to effect a one-for-one exchange,
set free a motley group of men, women and teenagers wearing tracksuits or dirty jeans, and taken, they said, from jails as far away as Kiev.

Soon enough, many of them were objecting to anybody who would listen there on the highway that they had never fought for pro-Russian separatists,
and in fact had no idea how they ended up in a prisoner exchange in eastern Ukraine