Ukraine’s released pilot returns to parliament

Kiev / AFP

Ukraine’s defiant pilot Nadiya Savchenko sang the national anthem on Tuesday in a strident first appearance in parliament since her release in a prisoner swap with Russia last week.
The 35-year-old member of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s populist party strode to the podium draped in the flag of Ukraine and holding one of Crimea at the opening of the emotional session.
Savchenko has turned into a national symbol of resistance to Russia since joining a volunteer battalion fighting pro-Russian eastern separatist insurgents and then being taken prisoner in June 2014. She then mysteriously re-emerged in a Russian detention centre and was sentenced to a 22-year jail term for her alleged role in the murder of two Moscow state television journalists covering the war in July 2014.
Her swap for two purported members of Russia’s military intelligence service who were captured during a May 2015 battle culminated months of international negotiations and was celebrated in the West.
But some analysts say that Savchenko may yet turn into a thorn in the side of President Petro Poroshenko because of her political ambitions and high esteem among veterans and soldiers still fighting in the former Soviet republic’s 25-month war. Savchenko has already floated the possibility of one day running for president and gave a hint of the trouble she may cause other members of parliament—some of them tainted by links to powerful business interests—in her opening address.
“I have returned and I will not let you forget —you, the people who sit in these armchairs in parliament—about the boys who began laying down their lives for Ukraine on Maidan Square and continue dying today in the east,” she said.
Ukraine’s bloody Euromaidan Revolution toppled an unpopular Moscow-backed leadership and opened the door to stronger ties with the West in February 2014.
Russia still denies seizing the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea and both plotting and backing the separatist conflict in retribution for seeing Ukraine pull out of its historic sphere of influence.
“I want to tell you that nothing is forgotten, no one is forgotten, and no one is forgiven,” Savchenko said firmly.
“The people of Ukraine will not let us sit here if we betray them,” she added in a veiled warning of another possible popular revolt.
“Ukraine is more important than the life of every one of us,” she told the deputies.
The Ukrainian conflict has claimed the lives of more than 9,300 people and severely damaged Moscow relations with the West.