Ukrainian aviator Nadezhda Savchenko is in custody due to accusations of her involvement in the murder of Russian journalists. During her last oral testimony, she stated today in the Donetsk city that she was innocent and didn't recognize the verdict of the Russian court.
"I do not admit any guilt or the sentence of the Russian court. There will be no appeal in the case of a conviction. After the verdict I will continue to strike for another 10 days. After 10 days I declare a hunger strike, and then Russia will have 10 days to transport me to Ukraine,'' Savchenko said in Ukrainian, Interfax reports.
According to investigators, on June 17th 2014 the officer of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Savchenko was in the Aydar battalion near the village of Metalist in the Slavyanoserbsk district of the Lugansk region who conducted covert surveillance and correction of artillery fire on the site of a roadblock of the Luhansk militia together with civilians, including three Russian correspondents of VGTRK. As a result of the shelling, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin were killed.
Savchenko's statements were an impetus for a new round of escalation of anti-Russian hysteria in neighboring Ukraine. Today, several hundred people staged a rally once again near the Russian Embassy in Kiev. They threw stones and bottles of iodine at the building, Tass cites the press secretary of the Russian embassy in Kiev, Oleg Grishin.
The leader of the Radical Party of Ukraine, Oleg Lyashko, said in a video on his YouTube channel that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko should have offered himself in exchange for Nadezda Savchenko and proposed to cut all diplomatic and business relations with Russia, not allowing Russian companies to work on Ukrainian territory.
Earlier, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova, commenting on the statement of US Secretary of State John Kerry's critics, noted that there was no condition in the Minsk arrangements regarding Nadezhda Savchenko. Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in his turn, commenting on the proposal of European MEPs to impose sanctions against Vladimir Putin because of the 'Savchenko case', said that interference in trials of the Russian Federation was unacceptable, adding he wasn't aware of any appeals to exchange Savchenko for somebody from arrested citizens of the Russian Federation in Ukraine.
The Director General of the Caspian Cooperation Institute, political analyst Sergey Mikheyev, told in an interview with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza that there were no signs that the West is reformatting the Ukrainian question, so the Minsk agreements will now become the basis of pressure on Russia.
The president of the Strategy Institute, Mikhail Remizov, told Vestnik Kavkaza there are some signs that the West is trying to reformat the Ukrainian issue, which is why the "Savchenko case" will be the basis of pressure on Russia instead of the Minsk agreements, as it was with the list of Magnitsky.
"Indeed, we can say that there are a number of long-running stories, which may serve as a breeding ground for pressure on Russia. The "Savchenko case" is one of them. If we imagine that the Minsk process will develop more successfully than it is today or that the West will recognize Kiev's responsibility for the failure of the Minsk agreements, there will be a sufficient number of problems in Russian-Ukrainian relations that create a negative political background.
