Ukrainian consul in Moscow Hennadiy Breskalenko is currently in Voronezh and is ready to meet with Ukrainian military pilot Nadia Savchenko, who is being held in pretrial custody there, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said.
“The consul has been there since yesterday. I hope he will see her today,” Klimkin said at a news conference on Thursday, July 10.
Savchenko has a Russian government-appointed defense lawyer, but Ukraine does not trust him and is looking for another one, Klimkin said.
The minister encouraged the media to cover the problem as much as they can and compared Savchenko’s detention to the inmates of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
“What is currently happening to Nadia Savchenko, as our citizen has found herself in a different country, goes beyond the framework of both politics and morality,” he said.
Savchenko, a 31-year-old navigator, served with the Ukrainian peacekeeping force in Iraq, after which she graduated from the Ivan Kozhedub Kharkiv Air Force University in 2009.
She was fighting with the Aidar volunteer battalion in eastern Ukraine when she was captured in June near the town of Schastia, a suburb of Luhansk.
It was reported on Wednesday that Savchenko is being held at a detention facility in Voronezh and has been indicted for complicity in murder. “Investigative bodies have indicted Savchenko for complicity in the killing of VGTRK journalists outside Luhansk,” a spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee said.
The Investigative Committee claims that Savchenko was detained in Russia after crossing the border without documents under the guise of a refugee.
