Lawmaker Nadiya Savchenko held a private meeting with leaders of Russian-backed separatists who control of parts of Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts in Ukraine, a Ukrainian news website has reported.
Savchenko met with Alexander Zakharchenko and Ihor Plotnitskiy, the separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, respectively, when all three visited Minsk on Dec. 7 – the same day Minsk peace agreement official negotiators were meeting in the Belarusian capital.
Savchenko, a Batkivshchyna Party lawmaker, PACE delegate and former helicopter pilot in the Ukrainian Army,was illegally imprisoned in Russia for more than two years on charges of being complicit in the murder of two Russian journalists. She was greeted as a hero when she was released and returned to Ukraine in May.
But she was harshly criticized by the government and others when it emerged that she had held the talks aside from the Trilateral Group (of Ukraine, Russia, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The government, in particular, said Savchenko had no authority to conduct such a meeting.
News of the meeting was broken by Peter Shuklinov, the news editor of the Liga.net Ukrainian news website, referring to his sources in Ukraine’s contact group in Minsk.
“When I asked Savchenko to confirm if she had met and then spoken for several hours with Plotnitskiy and Zakharchenko, she said she had not come here to answer my questions, and she wouldn’t do it,” Shuklinov wrote on Facebook, describing an accidental encounter with Savchenko in President Hotel in Kyiv on Dec.11.
However, the press service of the Russian-backed groups currently in control of part of Luhansk Oblast confirmed to the Kyiv Post on Dec. 12 that Plotnitskiy and Zakharchenko had indeed met with Savchenko in Minsk and discussed how to launch an “all-for-all prisoner exchange” under the Minsk process.
Darka Olifer, the spokesperson of Leonid Kuchma, the official representative of Ukraine at the Minsk talks, told the News One TV channel on Dec.12 that Savchenko, Zakharchenko and Plotnitskiy, hadn’t been officially invited to participate in the Trilateral Group meeting in Minsk on Dec. 7.
Savchenko has since refused to comment on the meeting, but her sister Vira (Savchenko) told the Interfax news agency on Dec. 12 that the lawmaker would soon hold a press briefing to “set the record straight.”
Liga.Net reported that Zakharchenko and Plotnitskiy had come to Minsk by plane from Russia and were met at the airport by representatives of Russia’s FSB security service and officials from the Russian embassy in Belarus.
Some experts even saw Savchenko’s unexpected move as a new line of attack by the Kremlin on Ukraine.
“Savchenko traveling to Minsk without notifying the Security Service of Ukraine is an act of treason,” political analyst Taras Berezovets wrote in an opinion piece for weekly news magazine Novoye Vremya.
“It’s part of a new Kremlin plan to useSavchenko and the relatives of Ukrainian captives to put pressure on Kyiv,” he wrote.
Berezovets wrote that the Kremlin would allow Savchenkoto be the person to finally make a deal on a prisoner swap with the separatists in order to undermine the credibility of the government in Kyiv.
Adviser to the head of the SBU YuriyTandit told the 112 TV Channel on Dec.12 that the SBU monitors the movement of Ukrainian politicians abroad, but that it was not informed about Savchenko’s visit to Minsk.
In her biographical book “A Strong Name Nadiya,” Savchenko wrote she was captured by Russian-backed mercenaries of Luhansk in summer 2014 after she disobeyed an order from her commander and went to the front with her civilian sister Vira to take part in an operation to save Ukrainian soldiers trapped behind enemy lines.
She described how her prisoners humiliated and undressed her, but wrote she had no anger against them because they “had their own truth.”
For almost two years following her abduction from Ukraine in June 2014, she was held in various Russian prisons, and subjected to a sham trial in a Russian court. She was freed 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.
She was pardoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin and exchanged on May 25, 2016 for two Russian intelligence officers who had been captured in the Donbas.
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.
