As he sobered up through the long, strange night, the captive man grew more and more afraid. He recalled the previous hours through a blur of alcohol and pain: drunkenly insulting a group of pro-Russia men, being clubbed and dragged to a makeshift base; and then the raised stakes when they found out who he was. He remembered an injection — maybe a truth serum, he thought, or something for the pain — and a videotaped confession, where he admitted to recruiting men to fight the separatists overrunning eastern Ukraine. Now he was in their nerve center, an 11-story government building in the regional capital of Donetsk ringed by razor wire and barricades. He was handcuffed to a chair in a busy hallway beneath fluorescent lights. Some of the armed men passing by bent down and threatened to kill him. The man, a pro-Kyiv activist, had found himself in the heart of a shadow war fueled by hostage taking and a rush to militarize.
BuzzFeed: Inside a nerve center of Ukraine’s shadow war
A sticker of the self-proclaimed \"Donetsk People's Republic\" adorns a ballot box at at School No. 17 in Donetsk.
