Nadiya Savchenko, the 33-year-old Ukrainian army lieutenant captured by Russia and accused of murder, has been on a hunger strike since Dec. 13 to protest the prison administration's refusal to let her see a doctor. Her sister, Vira, went to Moscow on Jan. 20 to see Nadiya, who is also a member of Ukraine's parliament with Batkivshchyna party.
According to Russian law, Savchenko can accept visitors twice a month. A volunteer of the Aidar Battalion, she was captured on June 17 in Luhansk Oblast, refused to cooperate with Kremlin-backed separatists and illegally taken to Russia in what supporters says are trumped-up charges of being involved in the murders of two Russian journalists in the Donbas war.
Vira Savchenko has been allowed to see her sister, lawyer Ilya Novikov wrote on Facebook in the morning on Jan. 20. “She’s just said they’re waiting for an interpreter as they want to interrogate her (Vira). I recommended her not to participate in any interrogations.”
Earlier, Vira told Glavred, a Ukrainian website, that she doesn’t know what to do to free her sister. “The team (involved in defending Nadiya’s rights) lacks unity… I’m trying to understand all the legal details myself.”
Nadiya lost 15 kilograms during more than five weeks of a hunger strike. Now she weighs around 60 kilograms. She experiences dizziness, but the blood sugar rate has not fallen to the critical level yet, Novikov wrote. Savchenko has been under a medical intravenous feeding three times so far to provide her organism with glucose. The prison administration is considering forced feeding.
“I know, Nadiya wrote a statement saying that in a case of emergency she allows to give her glucose,” Vira said.
“It’s a shame that I can’t do anything from the prison,” Nadiya Savchenko wrote in a Jan. 12 letter from the prison. “This is why I decided to fight through the only method I have – a hunger strike.”
“I’ve got cosmonaut’s health, I’ll handle it! … I’ve never been weak and won’t be weak,” she added. “Through my protest – a hunger strike – I want to get some common sense from the Russian authorities and Investigation Committee. There is hard evidence of my innocence regarding the charges that I’m accused on.”
Ekaterina Maldon, a Russian human rights activist who organizes demonstrations in support of Savchenko in Moscow, says she’s been on a hunger strike too. “After 13 days, I couldn’t put my shoes on – when you lean down, the head is so heavy that you may simply fall… After 15 days, I stopped,” she said.
Given the political nature of accusations against Savchenko, president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Anne Brasseur, in Kyiv on Jan. 15, called for the immediate release of the Ukrainian officer.
“I call for the immediate release of all (prisoners of war) and among these people I also mention pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who now is being imprisoned by the Russian authorities. Ms. Savchenko is now assigned to the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly,” she said. “Moreover, there are many reasons for her release, including humanitarian one, as her health condition continues deteriorating as a result of her hunger strike.”
Italian parliamentarian Eleonora Cimbro asked the Italy’s Foreign Affairs Ministry to get involved in liberation of Savchenko.
Savchenko has become a feminist icon for her patriotism and determination. Three times she applied to get a higher military education and three times was rejected because of her female sex, but didn’t stop her attempts. After receiving a written recommendation from the then-Defense Minister Anatoliy Grytsenko, she got accepted into the Kharkiv Air Force University in 2005.
Prior to this, she served for six months in Iraq with a unit of Ukrainian peacekeepers that lost 18 people during that mission. Seven of them got killed on Jan. 9, 2005 when trying to defuse the bomb. However, Savchenko survived the accident.
“I was walking among the corpses, drinking my juice and trying to identify the dead,” she recalls.
Kyiv Post associate business editor Ivan Verstyuk can be reached at [email protected].
