UKRAINIAN historians may yet be grateful to
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. His war against the country has given it a
rallying cause. He has also provided it with a national hero, a Ukrainian Joan
of Arc. She is Nadia Savchenko, a 34-year-old military pilot who served in
Iraq.
In July 2014 Ms Savchenko was captured by pro-Russian rebels in eastern
Ukraine, smuggled by Russian security services across the border and put on
trial for allegedly directing artillery fire that resulted in the death of two
Russian television journalists. Prosecutors are demanding that she be sentenced
to 23 years in jail and fined 100,000 roubles ($1,400). The fact that she was
captured at least an hour before the journalists were killed did not seem to
interest the court.
Ms Savchenko’s trial, which has been under way
for nearly two years, has also turned into a prosecution of the Russian legal
system. She has been made a member of Ukraine’s parliament and appointed to the
parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe. Western and Russian
intellectuals have signed petitions in her support. John Kerry, America’s
secretary of state, called for her immediate release, as did Federica
Mogherini, the EU’s high representative for foreign policy. She has several
admirers among prominent Russian liberals. Not since Soviet times has a case of
a political prisoner in Russia caused such furore.
On March 9th Ms Savchenko, who has been held in
prison in the small town of Donetsk, in southern Russia, made a closing
statement in her trial: “I accept neither guilt, nor the verdict, nor the
Russian court…I want the whole democratic civilised world to realise that
Russia is a third-world country, with a totalitarian regime and a petty
tyrant-dictator, where human rights and international law are spat upon.” She
then leapt onto a bench inside a cage and showed her middle finger to the
court’s three judges. She finished off by singing the Ukrainian national
anthem.
Since her trial began Ms Savchenko has posed a
direct challenge to the Kremlin: either it returns her to Ukraine or she dies
in jail. Ms Savchenko is not bluffing: she has been on several hunger strikes,
including one that lasted 82 days. On March 4th she refused to take water or
food and said she would continue her fast until her verdict. But the court said
this would not happen until March 21st. On March 10th she agreed to take water.
Ms Savchenko would not have become a martyr if
she had not been abducted. She was one of the activists of the Kiev revolution
in early 2014. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea she joined Aidar, one of the
most controversial “voluntary” battalions fighting the separatists in the east
of Ukraine. Amnesty International, an NGO, claims that Aidar was involved in
several human-rights violations, including abductions and unlawful detentions.
But Ms Savchenko may turn out to pose as much of
a threat to the Ukrainian government, which has been mired in corruption
scandals and internal squabbling, as she does to the Kremlin. If and when she
returns to Ukraine she will be given a hero’s welcome. She could well turn into
a populist leader who could rally the people against the government.
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