Georgians Rally in Support of Savchenko Demanding Her Release

At a rally held late Tuesday night in central Tbilisi, hundreds came out in support of Ukrainian political prisoner Nadya Savchenko and demanded that Russia immediately grant her release.

Gathering in front of the Russian section at the Swiss Embassy, protesters lit lanterns with images of Savchenko’s face, and projected various anti-Russian slogans on the facade of a building that once housed Moscow’s embassy in Tbilisi.

“Nadya Savchenko is a symbol of freedom. No matter how this fight will end, she will be the winner. We on the outside should do everything possible to save her life. She is an amazing woman,” said Women’s Movement representative Baia Pataraia.

The rally was part of a growing global movement in support of Savchenko, a 34 year-old former first lieutenant and the Ukrainian armed forces’ sole woman combat pilot, who has spent more than 600 days in captivity after she was kidnapped and illegally smuggled across the border to Russia by Moscow-backed rebel separatists in east Ukraine.

Protests supporting Savchenko’s plight were held across Europe and North America on 9 March, each demanding that Russia’s authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, immediately and unconditionally grant her release.

In an unprecedented move Wednesday, 57 members of the European Parliament requested that Putin and 28 other officials connected to Savchenko’s case be placed under stiff sanctions.

The parliamentarians publicly demanded that the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Federica Mogherini, take action against Russia’s fabricated charges.

Detained and Kidnapped

Prior to her capture, Savchenko served as a front line combat soldier in Ukraine’s all-volunteer Aidar Battalion, fighting in the country’s east against units of the Russian armed forces and their heavily armed rebel proxies.

She was captured by separatist units near a small village in the war torn Lugansk Region on 22 June 2014, shortly after her detachment was surrounded and cut off by Russian troops.

Subjected to torture and harsh interrogation methods – including being stripped naked and chained to a metal pipe – Savchenko was then illegally transferred by her captors to a military prison in the southern Russian city of Voronezh and later accused by a local prosecutor of directing artillery fire that killed two Russian freelance journalists who were reportedly in the area at the time of Savchenko’s arrest.

Moscow authorities formally charged Savchenko with murder and an illegal border violation, claiming she’d intentionally crossed into Russia without a valid passport or legal documents.

She now faces up to 23 years in a Russian penal colony, if convicted.

Her defense counsel, former Pussy Riot lawyer Mark Feygin, claims she was intentionally targeted by Russia’s feared FSB intelligence service and is being held, not as a legal combatant, but as a political prisoner.

According to GPS positioning devices and mobile phones carried by both Savchenko and the rebels units who captured her, she was taken prisoner more than one hour before the death of the two Russian journalists in question and in a location far from the site of where they were killed.

Moscow’s Intransigence

Russia’s Kremlin-controlled media repeatedly casts Savchenko as a bloodthirsty anti-Russian Fascist, often using blatantly sexist epithets when describing her.

One Moscow-based news outlet went so far as to call her ‘a killing machine in a skirt’ and attempted to depict her as “a cold blooded killer who supports the Western-backed junta in Kiev.”

Both Kremlin and court officials – including the presiding judge – have consistently circumvented Russia’s legal code by insisting that she is guilty and going on record as to say that the hard evidence pointing to Savchenko’s whereabouts at the time of her capture is nothing but “Western propaganda.”

Contradicting the claim that she was taken prisoner in combat by rebel forces, the prosecutor in charge of the case claims that Savchenko voluntarily and illegally crossed the border into Russia without her passport and was summarily detained as an illegal alien.

International Cause Celebre

Since her capture, Savchenko won a seat as a parliamentarian in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada and became a member of the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly.

Russia has refused to recognize her legal right to diplomatic immunity as a sitting member of government, saying the events she is charged with predate her status as a sitting parliamentarian.

Western governments and the UN have called for her immediate release, claiming her detention is politically motivated.

Moscow has angrily responded to the pleas, saying international pressure regarding the case amounts to illegal interference in the Russian criminal justice system.

“These are unacceptable attempts by a foreign body to meddle in our judiciary process,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Wednesday.

Defiance

At her last court appearance before sentencing is announced on 21 March, Savchenko defiantly closed out her defense by calling on Russia’s people to emulate their Ukrainian counterparts and rise up against Putin’s dictatorial regime.

In a final gesture aimed directly at the Russian state, a defiant Savchenko vehemently declared that she would never recognize the legitimacy of the court or its verdict.

She then stood on a bench inside the iron cage that serves as a dock for defendants and forcefully raised her middle finger in the direction of the judge.

In a scathing final speech from atop the bench, she pledged to continue the hunger strike she began days earlier and vowed to return to Ukraine as a free woman, either dead or alive.

Nicholas Waller