A Kyiv court has ruled to hold former Ukrainian military pilot and lawmaker Nadiya Savchenko in custody for 59 days without bail, a day after the Verkhovna Rada stripped her of parliamentary immunity and she was arrested by law enforcement.
Savchenko stands accused of conspiring with Volodymyr Ruban, a former organizer of prisoner swaps with the Russia-backed separatists in the Donbas, and the separatist leaders to violently overthrow the Ukrainian government.
The group allegedly planned to assassinate President Petro Poroshenko and other top officials, as well as shell the parliament.
In the course of a day-long hearing on March 23, Savchenko harshly criticized the Ukrainian authorities and the prosecutor.
“I am sorry that people like you are the pillars of power,” she said, according to the Unian news agency. “Later you will be sawed down and everything will be shaken up, and then you will be the ones dying on the front line, like our soldiers are now disappearing.”
“But there was a time when it was the volunteer battalions that, like pillars, held up these rotten authorities,” Savchenko added.
She also declared a hunger strike.
“I will walk the same path I walked in Russia, when the enemy tortured me,” she said, according to the BBC. “I can take that path when they will torture their own [countrymen].”
Media crowd into a Kyiv courtroom for a hearing on whether to release parliamentarian Nadiya Savchenko on bail on March 23. (Volodymyr Petrov)
In June 2014, Savchenko was captured by separatists in Ukraine’s Luhansk Oblast, transported to Russia, and charged with the killing of two Russian journalists, who died in a mortar attack while covering the war. In May 2016, she was freed through a prisoner exchange.
While in Russian custody, Savchenko was elected to the Rada as a member of the Batkivshchyna party. She even stated that she was prepared to become president of Ukraine. However, the party expelled her in late 2016 after she admitted to secretly meeting with the Kremlin-backed separatist leaders in Minsk.
After the bail hearing, as Savchenko was about to be led out of the courtroom, she shouted to supporters, “Until we meet on the outside.”
If found guilty in court, Savchenko could face life imprisonment.
