You're reading: Home Front: Savchenko finds fresh enemies in the corridors of power

Nadiya Savchenko slumps into a white leather chair, and lights up a cigarette.

It is early on a rainy July morning in Kyiv, and Savchenko, the 35-year-old Ukrainian pilot who rose to national prominence following her abduction from Ukraine and two years of captivity in Russia, is exhausted after a trip to eastern Ukraine.

We are in Savchenko’s office in the Batkivschyna Party central headquarters in Kyiv. Her office is bare of photographs, in contrast to the corridors of the building, which are lined with dozens of portraits of the party’s leader, Yulia Tymoshenko.

“No photos of her in my office, nor any pictures of me,” says Savchenko.

Nadiya Savchenko talks to the Kyiv Post in her office at the Batkivshchyna Party headquarters in Kyiv on July 21.

Instead, a large map of Ukraine, with the territories occupied by Russia’s proxy forces in the east marked out, hangs on the wall. The only decorations are a traditional handmade motanka (a rag doll, usually dressed in traditional costume: Savchenko’s, however, is in military uniform) and a model of a Mi-24 attack helicopter.

“I piloted the same kind,” says Savchenko. “This model was made and presented to me by the prisoners from a Ukrainian jail.”

Savchenko, of course, is not long out of jail herself. For almost two years after her abduction from Ukraine in June 2014 she was held in various Russian prisons, and subjected to a sham trial in a Russian court. Only after she was formally sentenced to 22 years in prison for allegedly being complicit in the killing of two Russian journalists in a mortar attack in the Donbas was she freed, in exchange for the release by Ukraine of two Russian intelligence officers captured in the Donbas.

It was in jail that she gained the popularity that has now brought her to political prominence in Ukraine. As she wrote in her memoir, entitled “A Strong Name Nadiya,” she received thousands of letters of support from all over the world during her detention.

She gained the status of a hero in Ukraine for her defiance of the kangaroo court in which she was tried, for her vocal disdain for Russian President Vladimir Putin, and for her repeated hunger strikes. She was elected to parliament in absentia, made a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and became a symbol of Ukraine’s defiance against Kremlin aggression.

So when the presidential plane brought her from captivity back to Boryspil Airport, many Ukrainians felt that hope (her very name means “hope”) had returned to Ukraine. People even saw her as the next leader of the nation.

She did nothing to dispel that notion at her first news conference two days after her return, during which she said she was ready to become president – if the people wanted it.

But she also said her popularity might soon wane.

“Now people rush up to me with flowers and kisses, and want to take those stupid selfies. By tomorrow all the greetings could turn into stones thrown at my back,” she said at the news conference.

Two months later, the stones are indeed starting to be tossed.

People’s Front lawmaker Anton Gerashchenko recently dubbed Savchenko “the Trojan Horse of Putin.” During her visit to the Sea Breeze air-naval exercises on July 24, a man threw an egg at her, but missed.

A petition to revoke Savchenko’s title of Hero of Ukraine, awarded to her on her release, was registered on the presidential website on June 22. The petition’s author, Yevhen Prokopushyn, asked President Petro Poroshenko to revoke Savchenko’s title because, he claims, she was recruited by the Russian authorities while in jail and is now working against Ukraine.

The cause of these attacks is her suggestion that the Ukrainian authorities should abandon the Minsk II peace deal, signed in February 2015, and instead directly negotiate with the Russian-backed separatists that have seized control in part of the Donbas.

“They aren’t our enemies,” she said, angering many in Ukraine.

Moreover, she has also said that the economic and political sanctions imposed on Russia by the European Union and the United States should be lifted. Savchenko argues that sanctions should harm only the politicians in charge of the war against Ukraine, not all Russians.

Answering back

Savchenko reacts to such criticisms with a calm smile, saying she has no intention of becoming just another politician, making sweet and fitting patriotic statements while actually doing nothing.

“Unfortunately, too many Ukrainians are uneducated people who have never gone outside the borders of the country, and don’t know chalk from cheese,” Savchenko told the Kyiv Post.

“I wish people wanted to listen, and not only to talk — they would have heard and understood my message then,” she said.

Savchenko has been criticized for seemingly supporting the positions of Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian political mandarin who is close to Putin, and who is Ukraine’s representative at the Minsk trilateral group on prisoner exchanges. Some politicians have even suggested that she has echoed the views of Medvedchuk because she is in hock to him for her own release.

For instance, People’s Front Party lawmaker Ihor Lapin recently told the censor.net news agency that Savchenko’s statement on lifting anti-Russian sanctions contained “the words of Medvedchuk, who wants (the sanctions) to be canceled.”

But Savchenko is dismissive of any claims that she has connections to Medvedchuk.

“I won’t start spouting patriotic phrases, like ‘Medvedchuk is bad,’ for example,” Savchenko told the Kyiv Post. “They (the politicians) can blab whatever they want. Their businesses keep going pretty well in Russia.”

For Savchenko, the sanctions won’t bring back the Donbas, and the war won’t either, so tactics must be changed.

“Despite all the criticism, I will talk to the people of Donbas, and especially to the people of the occupied districts,” she insists.

During her trip to Luhansk Oblast, to the front line town of Stanitsa Luhanska, she had the chance to speak to people from both occupied and government-controlled territories.

“People from the uncontrolled territories told me they were unhappy there,” Savchenko says. “But Ukraine doesn’t want to fulfill all their demands. I asked them to be honest and think what they can do for Ukraine. They did everything to destroy the country when they voted at those referendums (on independence, in May 2014).”

Now it is time for these people to admit they were wrong and ask for forgiveness, she says.

But it’s not only the Russian-backed separatists and their supporters who should ask for forgiveness but Ukrainians as well, according to Savchenko.

“We also killed people there,” she says simply, when asked how Ukrainian soldiers could forgive the deaths and wounding of their comrades.

Savchenko says she is ready to go back to Luhansk and Donetsk and talk to the separatist leaders. However, she doesn’t sound very compromising.

“(Some) should care about their people, and run away back to Russia, or go to jail. Others should understand they can be prosperous only as part of Ukraine,” she says.

In her book, the pilot describes the Luhansk fighters who imprisoned her in 2014 as normal people, who just had their own reality. They didn’t harm her, but smoked a lot and discussed politics and other topics.

“They’re also Ukrainians, who just make a mistake. As a Ukrainian army officer I swore to protect them also, but I was forced to attack them instead,” Savchenko wrote in her book.

But perhaps unhelpfully for Savchenko, her position has also found support in Moscow: Russian propagandist and writer Eduard Limonov recently wrote approvingly of Savchenko in a personal blog.

“I thought she would join the punishers from the volunteer battalion gangs. Instead, she claimed Ukrainians need to ask for forgiveness of mothers from Donbas. Do your thing, Nadiya and don’t listen to the fat Kyiv dogs barking,” wrote Limonov.

Paper wars

Meanwhile, Savchenko is still learning the ropes as a lawmaker. “It’s a horrible responsibility, nervous tension and stress,” she says. Even with five assistants, she’s finding it difficult to cope – a hard admission given the public’s image of her as a sort of Ukrainian superwoman.

“You see so many problems around, want to solve them all, keep adding them to your to-do list. And then the fighting starts. It is impossible to make people do their work without a fight,” says Savchenko.

The pilot claims that the bureaucratic, paper war she now has to fight is more difficult than actual war. At least on the front it’s clear who your enemy is, she says.

But this political war is not one Savchenko intends to fight forever.

“I’m not the kind of person to stay in politics forever. I just want my country to stick to the right course. I don’t want to be a lifelong politician – I want to be effective,” she says.