Nadiya Savchenko walks in the prison meeting chamber like it’s a college classroom: equipped with a laptop and a notebook. She wants to run for president in the March 31 election.
Now an inmate accused of plotting a terrorist attack, Savchenko seems to be as far from a presidency as she is from the moon.
Among all of Ukraine’s politicians, Savchenko has had one of the most spectacular journeys. In the past four years, she went from being the most high-profile political prisoner held by Russia, a symbol of Ukrainian resistance and defiance to the enemy.
When the Kremlin freed her three years ago, she returned to Ukraine with a hero’s welcome and a seat in parliament, elected on ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna Party list in 2014.
Now she is back in jail, a Ukrainian one, accused of scheming to murder Ukrainian leadership, including the president and everyone in parliament.
Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has shown video in which Savchenko and Volodymyr Ruban, a prisoner exchange mediator, ask Ukraine’s special forces to assist them ina coup. Savchenko shared her detailed plan to assassinate Ukraine’s leaders during a session of parliament. In February 2018, Ruban was arrested driving a van full of weapons, he allegedly brought from Russian-occupied Donetsk.
Savchenko denies the charges, and says she knew the SBU filmed her and she was merely intent on scaring lawmakers. “Who didn’t dream of blowing up the Rada? But a dream is not a crime,” she said in March.
Justice, however it plays out, is not swift in coming. She’s been in pre-trial detention since March, facing 15 years if found guilty. She has been trying to win her release since March. On Jan. 21, the court postponed the next session in her case to Feb. 5.
No money to register
Meanwhile, Savchenko’s candidacy is unlikely. Several days before the Feb. 3 deadline for the candidates’ registration, she still hasn’t found Hr 2.5 million ($90,000) to pay the registration fee.
Meeting with the Kyiv Post in jail on Jan. 9, she didn’t seem worried, about the election or her trial.
“I was in the Russian prison, now I’m in a Ukrainian one. Not sure which one is better,” she says, and adds with a laugh: “I should try an American prison too.”
While Savchenko seems determined to stay in Ukraine’s political life, some say her moment of glory has passed.
“We’re watching the sad story of a political star’s fall from grace,” political analyst Volodymyr Fesenko said.
Hero to ‘Kremlin agent’
The Security Service of Ukraine pre-trial detention center is a gray building in Kyiv’s Pechersk district.
Most of the Russian-led fighters and Russian servicemen captured during Russia’s war against Ukraine in the Donbas, which has already killed more than 13,000 people since 2014, are awaiting trial here.
Two Russian intelligence officers, Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Yevgeniy Yerofeyev, were also kept here until they were exchanged in May 2016 for Savchenko.
A volunteer fighter, Savchenko was captured in June 2014 in Luhansk Oblast and illegally taken to Russia. The Kremlin accused her of assisting the murder of two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine and sentenced her to 22 years in prison in a sham trial criticized by the international community and human rights organizations.
For more than two years, Ukraine and its Western partners called on the Kremlin to release Savchenko.
When she finally returned home in 2016, Poroshenko gave her the Hero of Ukraine award and calls were already starting for her to run for president, a challenge she was willing to meet. In 2016, polls showed 11 percent of Ukrainians ready to support her bid.
But she even foreshadowed what came.
“Today you throw flowers at my feet, but tomorrow you’ll be throwing stones at my back,” Savchenko said back in 2016.
As soon as she started working as a lawmaker of Batkivshchyna Party, which has 20 seats in parliament and which Savchenko joined in absentia, and as a member of Ukraine’s delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Savchenko stood out.
After the tremendous efforts to win her release from Russia, Savchenko voluntarily returned to Moscow in October 2016 to attend the appeal court hearing of other Kremlin-held prisoners Stanislav Klykh and Mykola Karpyuk.
She also made an unauthorized visit to Minsk, Belarus, and led closed-door and unauthorized negotiations with the leaders of Russian-controlled parts of the Donbas. She even visited Russian-occupied Donetsk. Savchenko justified her efforts as attempts to speed up the release of other prisoners of war held by the Kremlin.
She also frequently and sharply criticized the Ukrainian government, branding it as corrupt and bloodthirsty.
Her behavior turned friends into foes in Ukraine. Politicians who had praised her changed their minds and slammed her for pushing the “Kremlin’s narrative” — such as negotiating directly with the Russian-controled militants in eastern Ukraine as if they were not controlled by Russia.
“The Kremlin has made Savchenko an instrument to destroy Ukraine,” Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said in an interview to Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Gordon on Jan. 21. “She is a charismatic but completely undisciplined person, an ideal weapon in a Bolshevik-style coup d’etat.”
Iryna Gerashchenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian parliament, and the president’s representative in the prisoners’ exchange process, said that Savchenko’s unpredictable behavior had damaged the prospects for prisoner exchanges. At least 100 Ukrainians are held by the Kremlin today.
Then Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko (C), who was freed from jail in Russia as part of a prisoner exchange, makes her first appearance after her plane landed in Ukraine at Kyiv’s Boryspil airport on May 25, 2016. (Volodymyr Petrov)
Uncontrolled
Today Savchenko recalls her downfall with a smile. Sitting in the meeting room in the SBU jail, she said Ukrainian politicians turned against her as soon as they understood she would not be their puppet.
“I knew this was going to happen. All those guys from Batkivshchyna, Poroshenko Bloc and the president himself needed a hero to strengthen the nation, an instrument for their own PR. But nobody knew I wouldn’t (be one),” Savchenko said.
She said that since childhood she had refused to be controlled, and always had a burning sense of justice, which made her fight with teachers.
“I was surprised when my school hung up an honorary sign with my name. I laughed a lot when they took it down later,” Savchenko said.
She remembered that Ukrainian politicians had first tried to coach her on the presidential plane that took her from Russia to Ukraine.
“They forbade me from going out to see the press waiting for me at the airport because the president was waiting for me,” Savchenko said. She didn’t obey and talked to the press first.
Her sister and political ally Vira Savchenko says Ukraine’s leadership has been trying to destroy Savchenko because they’re afraid of her.
“TV channels either do not report on her at all, or spill dirt on her. The authorities want to discredit her and make people forget about Savchenko,” Vira Savchenko told the Ukrainian TV channel NewsOne on Jan. 20.
NewsOne, a TV channel linked to a pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, is one of the few remaining media that reports about Savchenko and even airs her weekly show, where the lawmaker shares her views on the top news in Ukraine, recorded in prison.
“We know whose channel it is, but it’s our only platform right now,” says Savchenko’s aide Tetiana Protorchenko.
Presidential ambitions
Savchenko had been losing support even before the terrorism charges arrived in March, political analyst Fesenko recalls. Her numbers have since tanked — according to the latest presidential poll, published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology think tank in December, only 0.4 percent of Ukrainians still support her as president.
Vira Savchenko believes that pollsters scheme to keep her sister’s name out of the presidential polls.
Poll numbers, good or bad, won’t stop Savchenko from trying to run.
“While earlier I said I was ready to be president only if Ukrainians wanted me to, politics has taught me that you shouldn’t wait until someone gives you the green light. If you know how to lead, you should lead,” Savchenko said.
Savchenko started preparing a run for the presidency back in 2017 when she created her own political party — the Civic Platform of Nadiya Savchenko, which is now run by her sister and Savchenko’s close friends, her aide Protorchenko and a friend named Iryna Yuzik. On Jan. 26 the party nominated Savchenko as its presidential candidate.
She says she is ready to take the country on a new course, mostly a very liberal one: more freedoms for Ukraine’s regions, a free land market, referendums on all key issues, and electing judges and police chiefs.
“I don’t want to keep watching a mediocre movie when this movie is about my life too,” Savchenko says, explaining why she’s itching to get back in politics.
But her registration doesn’t look like it will come to pass. Days before the deadline, she doesn’t have the money to pay the candidate’s fee. She will have another chance in the parliamentary election in October, provided she isn’t convicted for terrorism by then.
