In two years, Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko has gone from hero to terrorist – if Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko is to be believed.
Savchenko, who was abducted from Ukraine, held hostage and subjected to a sham trial in Russia from June 2014 to May 2016, entered parliament after her release from captivity.
But now, Lutsenko said on March 15 in parliament, she plotted to carry out an attack on the Rada.
“The investigators have irrefutable evidence that Savchenko was planning and managing the terror attack in this (Verkhovna Rada) hall,” Lutsenko told the lawmakers.
“Her plan was to blow up the (government and guest seating areas) of parliament, then destroy the Rada ceiling using mortars,” Lutsenko said to the lawmakers on March 15.
“After that, she was planning to finish off all the lawmakers who survived by shooting them with machine guns.”
Later he asked parliament to strip Savchenko of her immunity from prosecution so that she could be arrested.
Lutsenko made his sensational claim the same day Savchenko returned to Ukraine from Strasbourg to give testimony to the Security Service of Ukraine as a witness in a case against Volodymyr Ruban, a Donbas war mediator accused of attempting to assassinate Ukrainian leaders and smuggling weapons.
Savchenko was summoned for questioning on March 12, when she was abroad, representing Ukraine at the European Parliament’s headquarters in Strasbourg, France. While in France, she held several meetings on prisoner exchanges in the Donbas, according to her official Facebook page.
Earlier the same day, during a press briefing near the SBU’s headquarters in Kyiv, ahead of her interrogation by the security service, Savchenko said: “Who hasn’t dreamed about blowing up the Rada? But we’re not in (Soviet dictator Joseph) Stalin’s times, when such talk (about blowing up the Rada) would have been considered a crime.”
From hero to?
Savchenko was captured in June 2014 by Russian-backed armed groups in Luhansk Oblast, when she was participating in a rescue operation for the volunteer Aidar Battalion, which she joined after taking leave from military service.
She was secretly transported to Russia, where prosecutors blamed her for the deaths of Russian state TV journalists covering the war in Ukraine.
The Kremlin kept her imprisoned for almost two years.
She was released in exchange for two Russian intelligence officers who had been captured in Ukraine, Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeniy Erofeyev, and returned to Ukraine in a presidential plane in May 2016.
During her imprisonment, she was granted the status of Batkivshchyna Party lawmaker and became a hero of Ukraine due to her loud and determined defiance of the Russian regime, and numerous hunger strikes.
But she was expelled from the party in December 2016 after news broke that she had held a secret meeting with the leaders of the Russian-installed occupation authorities in the Donbas.
“When I landed in Boryspil, and you all were meeting me with flowers, I asked you not to give me flowers, as soon you would throw stones at me instead. And I was so right back then,” Savchenko said at a press briefing on March 15.
Shady Ties
Savchenko was summoned for questioning in Ruban’s case, as they had been good friends.
Ruban, a head of the Officers Corp organization and a mediator in prisoner swaps between Ukraine and Russian-led forces in Donbas, is accused of possessing illegal firearms, preparing terror attacks and attempting to assassinate President Petro Poroshenko and the country’s top officials, according to SBU charges filed in the Shevchenko District Court of Kyiv on March 9.
Earlier, on March 8, Ruban was arrested at the Mayorsk checkpoint near the Russian-occupied city of Horlivka in the Donetsk Oblast some 580 kilometers southeast of Kyiv while allegedly trying to smuggle a batch of weapons, including several 120-millimeter and 82-millimeter mortar shells, a 60-millimeter mortar, as well as dozen Kalashnikov assault rifles and unattached magazine cases, into Ukrainian-controlled territory.
The SBU’s charge papers, obtained by the Strana.ua news outlet, allege that Ruban purchased an arsenal of firearms, mortars, shells, anti-tank rockets, and grenades in the occupied Donbas to illegally transport it to Kyiv.
Ruban was actively involved in prisoner exchanges in 2014-2015, but was forbidden from taking part in such exchanges in 2016 by the SBU, which suspected he had overly close ties to the Russian-backed occupation authorities in the Donbas.
Ruban, as well as Savchenko, supposedly has close ties with another prisoner exchange mediator – the pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk.
“These ties with Russia and Medvedchuk make me laugh,” Savchenko said at the March 15 briefing.
“I have never met Medvedchuk, but I am grateful to him from all he did to release our soldiers from Russian captivity.”
She said she was the next opposition target of the current Ukrainian government, after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili.
“They’re just getting rid of witnesses who know too much about their crimes,” Savchenko said, referring to Saakashvili and Ruban.
Asked about the arsenal Ruban was arrested with, she hinted that it could have been a special forces operation and Ruban might actually have been helping the Ukrainian authorities get Russian-made weapons from the occupied parts of the Donbas in order to use as evidence against Russia.
“As a lawmaker, I’m going to bail out Ruban,” Savchenko said.
Also on March 15, Savchenko was expelled from parliament’s national security and defense committee.
After her interrogation by the SBU, Savchenko said Lutsenko’s request that her arrest be permitted and her exсlesion from the committee had both been illegal.
