Freed pilot wants to be president
Freed Ukrainian helicopter pilot Nadiya Savchenko says she is prepared to become her country’s president, after returning from Russia in a prisoner exchange.
‘‘Ukrainians, if you need me to be president, I’ll be president,’’ Savchenko told journalists during a media conference in Kiev yesterday. ‘‘To be honest, I won’t say that I want to be.
‘‘I love to fly. But if I need to, I’ll do everything, I’ll go down this road.’’
Ukraine’s first female military pilot, Savchenko was elected to the Ukrainian parliament and appointed to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe during her nearly two years in captivity, and some have wondered if she will be the country’s next leader.
She received a hero’s welcome when she flew to Kiev on Thursday after being pardoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Savchenko’s return was also a victory for Ukraine’s embattled president, Petro Poroshenko, who pledged to return Crimea and eastern Ukraine ‘‘just as we brought back Nadiya’’.
Savchenko was captured while fighting with pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine in June 2014, and was charged with complicity in the deaths of two Russian journalists who died in an artillery strike. A Russian court sentenced her to 22 years in prison in March after a trial that was condemned by Western countries.
Before her media conference, Savchenko took a dip in a fountain in Kiev’s Independence Square and sang Ukraine’s national anthem with well-wishers.
She promised to form committees to free political prisoners and return occupied territories, as well as fighting corruption in the Ukrainian army.
She also defended her comrades in the Aidar battalion, which Amnesty International has accused of war crimes.
‘‘You sit on the couch and ask us how we fought. We fought the way we had to. Or you think that saints are fighting there?’’ she said.
Savchenko said she didn’t blame anyone for her long captivity, and wouldn’t have been taken alive if she had had a grenade.
Two Russian special forces officers who were captured in eastern Ukraine and convicted of terrorism were flown to Moscow on Thursday as part of the prisoner exchange.
Despite her release, G7 leaders said this week that sanctions against Russia could only be rolled back when it fulfilled peace plan commitments agreed in Minsk.
The Ukrainian embassy in Belarus said Savchenko could join the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine in Minsk, which includes representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the eastern Ukraine separatists and is working to find a diplomatic resolution to the conflict.