Nadiya Savchenko, Former Ukrainian MP, killed in the special military operation zone
Former member of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine Nadiya Savchenko has been killed in the area of the special military operation, military blogger Vladimir Romanov said on his Telegram channel.
Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by Cezary Piwowarski,
Nadiya Savchenko 2017 Warsaw
According to Romanov, Savchenko was eliminated in a Russian air strike on May 11 this year. The strike was conducted targeting the headquarters of the 112th Territorial Defense Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). A three-ton FAB-3000 high-explosive aerial bomb was dropped on the enemy position. The exact location of the strike was not disclosed.
Savchenko commanded a territorial defense company
Savchenko was spotted on the front lines in November 2024. She had mobilized in the early days of the conflict with Russia and became the commander of a company in the 131st Battalion of the 112th Territorial Defense Brigade.
This unit became the center of a scandal. Savchenko’s former colleague, MP Maryana Bezuhla, claimed that she gave an order to retreat, which allowed Russian forces to advance significantly near Krasnoarmiisk (Ukrainian name: Pokrovsk). Bezuhla called for an investigation into Savchenko’s conduct as an officer, accusing her of making a series of mistakes that led to a breakdown in the AFU’s defense.
In response, Savchenko demanded that security services investigate Bezuhla, accusing her of “harming the territorial integrity and independence of Ukraine.”
Putin pardoned Savchenko, who had been sentenced to 22 years
Senior Lieutenant Nadiya Savchenko was captured in Russia’s Voronezh region on June 23, 2014. In 2016, the city court of Donetsk in Russia’s Rostov region found her guilty of killing Russian journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin. According to investigators, while serving as a volunteer with the nationalist Aidar battalion (designated a terrorist organization and banned in Russia) in Donbas, she passed on the coordinates of civilians to the AFU, which then shelled the area with D-30 howitzers.
Savchenko was sentenced to 22 years in a Russian penal colony. Later, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree pardoning her, and she was exchanged for Russian nationals Yevgeny Yerofeyev and Alexander Alexandrov, who had been convicted by a Ukrainian court.
Details
Nadiya Viktorivna Savchenko (born 11 May 1981) is a Ukrainian politician, former Army aviation pilot in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and former People’s Deputy of Ukraine.During the 2014 War in Donbas, Savchenko was a first lieutenant in the Ukrainian Ground Forces and served as instructor with a volunteer infantry unit. In June 2014, she was captured by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and handed over to Russia where she was accused of having directed artillery fire that killed two Russian state-television journalists in Ukraine. She was subsequently charged and convicted of murder and illegally crossing the Russian state border, despite being abducted from Ukrainian territory one hour before the deaths of the journalists. One of her lawyers, Mark Feygin, said she was a prisoner-of-war and called on the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations to demand her immediate release as well as the release of other Ukrainian POWs lest Russia be held in violation of the Geneva Conventions. European Union ministers and their representative regarded her detention as illegal and that her trial did not respect basic human rights, including the right to fair proceedings.
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