A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko to 22 years in prison over the killing of two journalists, in a ruling set to exacerbate Moscow’s feud with Kiev and the West.
Judge Leonid Stepanenko found the 34-year-old guilty of involvement in the fatal 2014 shelling of the Russian state television reporters in east Ukraine, a widely expected verdict slammed by Washington.
Ukraine’s pro-Western President Petro Poroshenko immediately pledged to “never recognize either this show trial or the so-called sentence,” and offered to swap Savchenko for two suspected Russian soldiers currently on trial in Kiev.
Crop-haired Savchenko — who has become a national hero in her homeland and elected to parliament in absentia — reacted as the judge read out the sentence at the end of the two-day ruling by shouting in Ukrainian and singing the Ukrainian national anthem.
Her defense team said she did not plan to appeal the “illegal” verdict.
The helicopter pilot — who was fighting in a pro-Kiev militia group against rebels in eastern Ukraine — insists she was kidnapped by separatist fighters before the journalists were killed in June 2014 and then illegally smuggled to Russia.
US Department of State spokesman John Kirby blasted Moscow’s “blatant disregard for the principles of justice” after the verdict and reiterated Washington’s calls for “Russia to immediately release Nadiya Savchenko.”
The guilty verdict over the deaths of journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin had long been considered a foregone conclusion and Kiev has been pushing for a prisoner swap to free Savchenko.
“[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has said that after the so-called sentence, he will return Nadiya Savchenko to Ukraine,” Poroshenko said in a statement. “The time to keep promises has come. I, in turn, am ready to hand over to Russia two Russian servicemen detained on our territory for their involvement in the armed aggression against Ukraine.”
Kiev said the two men — Captain Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Sergeant Aleksander Aleksandrov — were members of an elite Russian military intelligence unit helping rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Russia said the two servicemen were “volunteers” who were not on active duty and the Kremlin played coy in response to Poroshenko’s offer.
Savchenko’s lawyer Nikolai Polozov told journalists after the sentencing that she would “not appeal this illegal verdict” in which the pilot was also found guilty of illegally crossing the border into Russia and the attempted murder of civilians.
“She is an iron person — she has an iron will,” Polozov said.
Savchenko has threatened to start refusing all fluids 10 days after the sentencing as she bids to force her release in the latest of a series of hunger strikes she has staged since her arrest.
Throughout her detention, she has struck a defiant pose and was sent to a psychiatric hospital near Moscow before being transferred to the Russian town of Donetsk near the Ukraine border for her trial.
She has ridiculed the court from the defendant’s glass cage and flashed her middle finger at judges earlier this month as her trial ended. Rights groups have also slammed the case.
“Savchenko did not get a fair trial, and so her conviction is unsound and should not stand,” Human Rights Watch Europe and Central Asia director Hugh Williamson said. “There should be justice for the deaths of Kornelyuk and Voloshin, but justice won’t be served by an unfair trial that was highly politicized from the start.”
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees