Anna Nemtsova
Russian President Vladimir Putin may well regret
the decision to put Nadiya Savchenko on trial for murder.
MOSCOW — The Russian trial of a Ukrainian pilot,
Nadiya Savchenko, was interrupted for a break because the prosecutor felt sick,
RIA Novosti reported on Wednesday. The accused, on the other hand, was doing
just fine. In the defendant’s glass box, the 34-year-old wore a black shirt
with a white trident, Ukraine’s national symbol, and said she was ready to
proceed any time with a trial in which she’s accused of murdering two Russian
journalists. If convicted, her sentence could be anywhere from eight years to
life.
It’s been a long, tough year for Savchenko, but
also for her Russian accusers. She has been on multiple hunger strikes, even on
a “dry” one, without water. Her only family in the courtroom on Wednesday,
younger sister Vera, was also under an accusation for shouting at a judge. But
Savchenko looked calm, anything but beaten.
She smiled when she saw Vera, who
appeared as a witness wearing the same shirt as Savchenko’s, but white with a
black trident on her chest. “Vera enters, Ukrainian anthem plays,” Savchenko
joked happily, greeting her sister and ignoring the gloomy faces of security
officers, according to a transcript of the trial published by the website Media
Zona.
Everything about Nadiya Savchenko is a
statement, the declaration of a fighter going to war: The strong posture of a
trained soldier, the firm look in her piercing blue eyes, her comments, even
her jokes. Savchenko, a national hero in her home country, an enemy and
defendant in Russia, just keeps smiling, and thanks reporters and foreign
diplomats for coming.
Before the Russia-Ukrainian conflict in Crimea
and Donbass, Savchenko was little known in the wider world, but Ukraine knew
about her as its only woman veteran of the war in Iraq, where Ukrainian troops
served as part of the “coalition of the willing.”
Then, in June 2014, by her account, she was
captured while serving in eastern Ukraine and turned over to Russian officials.
They accused her of involvement in the death of two Russian journalists. The
arrest made her world famous.
Ukrainian activists and politicians put
Savchenko on their flags, elected her in absentia to the state parliament. Top
politicians discussed her fate. This week Savchenko’s lawyer were publicly
debating the best way to use U.S. Vice President Joseph R. Biden to negotiate a
prisoner exchange. Speaking in Kiev, Biden promised he would tell the world
about Nadiya Savchenko.
From the first days of her arrest last year,
those who knew Savchenko were impressed by her stamina. In her solitary cell,
Savchenko worked on her autobiography and folded origami animals for Russian
orphanages.
“She was never going to accept the lies by
Russian officials,” Zoya Svetova, an independent prison observer, told The
Daily Beast. “They claimed that she was arrested in Russian territory, but she
said Russian officials had grabbed her outside of Luhansk, then drove her with
an escort of six vehicles to the Russian town of Voronezh, where she was first
kept at a hotel as a witness, then arrested.”
As the trial continued on Thursday,
witnesses were questioned about how, exactly, Savchenko ended up in Russia. One
defense witness, Nadiya’s sister Vera, told the court about the day pro-Russian
rebels detained Savchenko in Donbass, and how her sister disappeared later.
Another defense witness, Vladimir Ruban, a Ukrainian general responsible for
swapping prisoners of war, talked about his negotiations trying to free
Savchenko in the rebel-controlled territories. He found it hard to believe the
official version, that rebels let Savchenko go and she crossed the Russian
border by mistake.
Such anomalous accusations have led to
comparisons between Shavchenko’s trial and those of some other famous Russians
seen to be railroaded by the authorities, like billionaire Putin opponent
Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the activists of Pussy Riot.
Svetova remembered the words she heard from the
pilot at one of their multiple meetings in jail: “We Ukrainians are not slaves,
we fight for our freedom,” Savchenko said.
There are 10 Ukrainian cases in Russia at the
moment, Svetova added, but Savchenko’s is the most well known by far. “She is
the most famous political prisoner because she is a woman who is melting to
bones on hunger strikes,” Svetova said.
It was the rejection of injustice that motivated
Savchenko to go on hunger strike, Svetova said. “Though she realized how
useless it was to try and push Putin that way, a hunger strike was the only way
she knew to maintain her innocence.”
avchenko insisted she had nothing to do with the
deaths of Russian reporters Anton Boloshin and Igor Kornelyuk. She told
reporters that maybe one day she had killed somebody innocent in Iraq, which
she was willing to go on trial for, but not for the two Russian reporters, who
she insisted she had never killed.
When a prosecutor made a comment about Savchenko
yelling in court on Wednesday, she sharply waved to him with an open palm, as
if saying, “Calm down.” The prosecutor threatened to remove Savchenko from the
courtroom for her behavior, to which the defendant answered she would begin a
new hunger strike.
For Russian officials in prisons, courts,
hospitals, Savchenko is like a hot potato that nobody wants to hold for too
long. In Russia even some hard men have admitted that the Ukrainian pilot’s
character is made of iron. In her previous hunger strike, last winter, she lost
15 pounds before Russian authorities realized it would be scandalous to see
Savchenko die of hunger in a Russian jail.
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