You're reading: Released Savchenko arrives in Kyiv, hints at political career

After almost two years of captivity in Russia, Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko, 35, is finally back at home.


After a Ukrainian government plane landed at Boryspil airport in the afternoon of May 25, Savchenko came out to talk to dozens of journalists, who immediately surrounded her.

“Pull back! All of you, please, don’t touch me,” she yelled. “I’m sorry, but I spent two years in a single cell, I lost the habit of being with people.”

Savchenko was exchanged for two Russian intelligence officers, Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Alexander Alexandrov, who were captured in Ukraine’s Donbas in May 2015.

The exchange took place in secrecy, and neither the Ukrainian government nor the Kremlin have given many details. However, on the morning of May 25 Ukrainian journalists noted that a Ukrainian presidential aircraft had flown to the airport of Rostov-on-Don, a southern Russian city close to Ukrainian border.

The plane arrived at the Russian airport around 10 a.m. and returned to Ukraine with Savchenko on board. It landed in Kyiv at 3 p.m.

Earlier, Ukrainian journalists reported that a Russian government aircraft had left a military airport near Kyiv bound for Russia. It was speculated that the two Russian officers were on board, and pictures later emerged on the Internet of the two arriving at one of Moscow’s airports.

Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned Savchenko to make her available for the exchange, media reported. Reuters reported that Poroshenko had done the same for the Russian intelligence officers, but his office is yet to confirm it.

Politics next

Savchenko was barefoot when she appeared before the journalists and supporters in the airport. She said she wanted to feel the soil of her homeland.

“I am free now,” she said in a shouting voice.

Savchenko apologized to the mothers of Ukrainian soldiers who are still imprisoned in Russia and in territories controlled by Russian-backed armed gangs, and of those who have been killed and “will never come home.”

Savchenko promised to keep fighting for Ukraine and Ukrainians, hinting that she will go for a political career. She is already a member of Ukrainian parliament, elected in absentia in 2014.

Now, she promises to bring more people like her in power.

“We will have in parliament the kind of people who are worthy of it. We will live in a way people deserve to live,” she said. “I don’t know how to do that, to be honest. And I do not promise it will happen tomorrow. But I’m ready to die for Ukraine.”

She also called the people of Ukraine to watch her and not let her change for the worse.

Two years in captivity

Savchenko, then a volunteer fighter with the Aidar Battalion, was captured by members of a Kremlin-backed armed group in the war-torn Luhansk Oblast in June 2014.

They passed her on to the Russian authorities, who accused her of coordinating the fire that killed two Russian journalists in Ukraine’s east.

Savchenko and her lawyers say that she was taken to Russia against her will. According to the Russian authorities, she crossed the border illegally without any documents.

Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry has described the incident as a case of kidnapping of a Ukrainian citizen and an act of state terrorism. An official at the Russian Investigation Committee, in response, described Savchenko as “a terrorist.”

Court hearings of her case were held in a small Russian town Donetsk in Rostov Oblast. Savchenko’s lawyers, as well as human rights watchdogs, said this had been done to keep activists and journalists as far away as possible from the sham trial.

At the last parliamentary elections in October, 2014, Savchenko was voted into the Verkhovna Rada as the first number on the party ticket of Yuliya Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party.

After two months, Savchenko was voted onto the Ukrainian delegation at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE). Early in 2015, PACE granted international immunity from prosecution to Savchenko, calling for her immediate release from a Russian prison.

Russia, however, ignored all appeals, and not only those made by PACE.

Path to freedom

Diplomats, politicians, human rights activists, journalists and celebrities all over the world voiced support for Savchenko and demanded that Russia release her.

Despite all the international outrage, and all the evidence provided by her defense, Donetsk court on March 22 found Savchenko guilty of complicity in the murder of two Russian journalists in Ukraine and sentenced her to 22 years in prison. Prosecutors had demanded 23 years.

In reply, she broke into a Ukrainian folk song – a reaction that fit perfectly with her behavior during the entire trial.

Savchenko showed no respect for the judges, saying she did not recognize the Russian court. During a March 9 court hearing, after judges postponed the announcement of their verdict, she made an obscene hand gesture at the judges as she gave her final address to court.

She also survived several hunger strikes carried out in protest at her detention, including one that lasted over a month.

Kyiv Post staff writer Alyona Zhuk can be reached at [email protected]