Ukrainian pilot released in prisoner-swap warns ‘nothing is forgotten or forgiven’

Ukrainian pilot and member of parliament Nadiya Savchenko raises the roof - and the ante- in her first appearance before her fellow deputies.

Nadiya Savchenko, Ukrainian pilot, member of the Ukrainian parliament and member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), sings the National anthem during a parliament session in Kiev, Ukraine, May 31, 2016. She was released on May 25 in a prisoner exchange. Sergey Dolzhenko/European Pressphoto AgencyShow less

Kiev // She was strong, she was strident, she was not to be cowed. In an emotionally-charged first appearance before the Ukrainian parliament on Tuesday, Nadiya Savchenko, the pilot released in exchange for two Russians strode to the podium draped in the Ukrainian flag and sang the national anthem. She also tore down a banner bearing her name and picture that had hung for months from the parliamentary rostrum.

She also carried the flag of Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula which was annexed by Russia in March 2014. Savchenko, 35, who is a member of former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s populist party, has become a national symbol of resistance to Russia. She joined a volunteer battalion fighting pro-Kremlin separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine and was taken prisoner in June 2014. She mysteriously emerged in a Russian detention centre and was sentenced to 22-years imprisonment for her alleged role in the murder of two Moscow state television journalists covering the war in July 2014.

After months of international negotiations, she was freed in exchange for Alexander Akexandrov and Yevgeniy Yerofeyev, two Russian special forces offices and purported members of Russia’s military intelligence service, who were captured during a battle in May 2015 battle. Her release as widely 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 own political ambitions and the high esteem in which she is regarded by veterans and soldiers still fighting in the 25-montbold war in the former Soviet republic. She 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. She also intimated a possible leading role in the struggle clean up the corruption which drove many to join the 2014 pro-EU revolt in the first place.

Some of the most prominent of the leaders of those historic days have since expressed disenchantment with Poroshenko’s seeming inability to eliminate decades of cronyism and back-room dealings from Ukrainian politics.

“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 popular revolt.

Ukraine’s bloody revolution of February 2014 toppled an unpopular Moscow-backed leadership and opened the door to stronger ties with the West. It was nicknamed Euromaidan, meaning European Square because it began with demonstrations in Independence Square in the Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

Russia still denies seizing Crimea and then plotting the separatist conflict in retribution for seeing Ukraine pull out of its historic sphere of influence.

The conflict killed more than 9,300 people and damaged Moscow’s relations with the West.

Parliament speaker Andriy Parubiy praised Savchenko for being “one of the irreplaceable symbols of Ukraine at a time when Ukraine was on fire”.

Other lawmakers stood and applauded as Savchenko approached the podium in a short-sleeved white shirt.

* Agence France Presse