Adding further to the murk: a list of Ukrainian soldiers’ names, purporting to be the names of the POWs on the Il-76, was published not long after news of the crash by Margarita Simonyan, the longtime head of the state-controlled TV channel formerly known as Russia Today.
Several of the names on the list, however, matched those of Ukrainian soldiers who had been released in earlier prisoner exchanges.
Also mysterious: videos from the debris-strewn field showed few signs of bodies or human remains.
“Believe me, if there were seven or eight dozen people there, the field would be strewn with corpses and remains of bodies,” Roman Svitan, a Ukrainian aviation expert, told Current Time.