Ukraine pilot ‘abducted and sold to Russia for show trial’
A UKRAINIAN army pilot accused of murdering two Russian journalists has described being smuggled across the border ‘‘at gun point’’ after her rebel captors said they would ‘‘sell her’’ to Moscow.
Nadia Savchenko, a 34-year-old helicopter navigator, testified for the first time at her trial in the small border town of Donetsk in southern Russia.
She denied the charges and said she had been taken from Ukraine into Russia ‘‘against my will’’.
Prosecutors say Savchenko deliberately called in a mortar strike that killed Anton Voloshin and Igor Kornelyuk, employees of Russia’s state-owned television network, during a battle near Luhansk on June 17 last year.
Savchenko said she ‘‘did not know’’ how to direct artillery fire, a role that requires specialist mathematical skills.
She also said she had been captured in an ambush by separatist fighters before Voloshin and Kornelyuk were killed.
Her captors, separatists from the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, at first held her as a prisoner of war, she said. ‘‘But less than a week later, they said that they would sell me to Russia,’’ she said.
She was then handed over to masked men with automatic weapons who ‘‘spoke with Russian accents and did not speak Ukrainian’’, she said. The men, who she assumed were Russian special forces, bundled her into a van and drove her over the border.
Savchenko has spent more than a year in detention and her case has become a focus of the propaganda war between Moscow and Kiev.
Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, is to meet Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and Francois Hollande in Paris tomorrow for talks on the progress of the Minsk peace agreement. Poroshenko gave a speech at the UN yesterday, a day after walking out as the Russian president addressed the general assembly.