Russia Jails Ukrainian Pilot To 22 Years
KABUL: (MEP) A court in Russia has sentenced has sentenced Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko to 22 years in prison for having hand in the death of two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Savchenko was found guilty of complicity in the murder of Anton Voloshin and Igor Kornelyuk, two journalists working for Russian state television who died in a mortar attack.
Savchenko smiled sardonically and began singing a traditional Ukrainian song, and chanting, “Glory to Ukraine!” as the judge announced her punishment. However, later she denied the charges, saying she had been kidnapped and smuggled to Russia before journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin were killed.
The 34-year-old politician and pilot—the first woman to graduate from Ukraine’s air force academy—had long denounced her trial as a “farce.”
Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, in response to the court ruling, said his country would never recognize the verdict and called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to send Savchenko back to Ukraine.
On Tuesday, that news became official. In the courtroom, Savchenko seemed to be indifferent to the judge’s final word. “Well, I do not care what sort of verdict it is. In 10 days, when the verdict takes effect, I will declare a dry hunger strike and keep it to the end,” she told reporters before the judge entered the courtroom. “I do not believe anybody in Russia any longer,” she added.
Savchenko was a helicopter pilot who had left the air force to fight with the Aidar volunteer battalion in east Ukraine at the time of her arrest. Prosecutors said she was responsible for directing artillery fire in an attack that killed two Russian TV journalists. The court refused to admit evidence of her phone calls that the defence team claimed would show she was not in the area at the time of the attack.
