You're reading: Time: Ukraine conflict becomes hostage crisis as separatists take prisoners

 Last week, when Irma Krat informed her friends in Kyiv, her hometown, that she was heading to eastern Ukraine to report on the region’s separatists, some of them tried to talk her out of it. As a journalist and activist with ties to nationalism in Ukraine, Krat had played an active role in the country’s revolution this winter, one of the few women to serve in the militia forces of the Maidan protest camp in Kyiv. In the eyes of the separatist forces, that would make her a target, and her friends were right to be concerned. When she arrived this past weekend in the separatist-held town of Slovyansk, in eastern Ukraine, she was almost immediately seized by armed men and taken to their security headquarters for interrogation.

 Read the story here.