After more than 40 days of hunger strike, Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian Lieutenant imprisoned from July in Russia, has been transferred to a prison hospital in Moscow. Her health has deteriorated terribly and her life is at risk, but Nadiya does not intend to give up.
Nadiya is a stubborn girl. It was already clear when the video of her first interrogation by Ukrainian rebels was uploaded on the Internet. Handcuffed to a pipe, she responded with frown to her captors. No sign of fear, no request for mercy in her eyes. Then again, when she reappeared behind bars in a courtroom in Moscow wearing a shirt with the Ukrainian trident. And she is proving it once again now, beating the record for the longest hunger strike in the prison no. 6 Moscow. “No one has ever endured so much,” the prison doctor said, according to Nadiya’s lawyer, Mark Feigin. “Usually, after a few weeks they will collapse”. “I have given my word“, Nadiya wrote in a January 12 open letter. “‘Until the day I return to Ukraine, or until the last day of my life in Russia, I will not back down”.
A high-profile political prisoner
Since the beginning of her hunger strike, on December13, Nadiya has lost at least 14 kilos. “Her health is deteriorating. She’s losing weight with every passing day,” Feigin said. “She’s become thin and hollow-cheeked. Changes are taking place in her body.” For more than 40 days, Nadiya has ingested only hot water, and some glucose transfusion occasionally. On January 29, due to her health conditions, she was transferred to the Moscow prison hospital Matroskaya Tishina.
It is not the first time that Nadiya ends up in a hospital. He has already spent much of her detention – still a pre-trial detention – in the notorious Serbsky psychiatric hospital in Moscow. It is a public institute for mental illnesses, infamous since the Soviet Union as a center of detention of dissidents, who were often declared mentally ill and subjected to inhumane “psychiatric treatment.” No need to say that Nadiya – already quite popular in Ukraine before for being the only female helicopter pilot in the country – has never had any mental health problem.
“Her case is heavily politicized,” said Anna Karetnikova, human rights activist and deputy head of Moscow’s Public Oversight Commission, a state body that monitors the treatment of detainees. “So maybe this is one of the rare cases when a hunger strike may actually work.” Feigin isn’t equally optimistic: “Russian authorities are deaf to such things. If she dies, she dies.” But is Sergey Golovaty, former Minister of Justice of Ukraine, to call a spade a spade: “The question of her liberation depends only on Putin’s political will.“
The hardest battle
Nadiya Savchenko was captured by separatist in the east of Ukraine and imprisoned in Lugansk. There were no information about her faith, until she re-appeared in the court of Voronezh, Russia. She is now accused of murder and illegal immigration. According to the Russian Investigative Committee, a kind of superpower of attorney directly subordinate to the Kremlin, Nadiya – a professional soldier of the Ukrainian army, an anti-tank helicopter co-pilot – would have run away from her own fellow soldiers seeking refuge in Russia. There, police found her without documents during a random control and arrested her for illegal immigration. Only later, the Russian police would have realized whom they had in their hands. Therefore, she was charged with the murder of Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin, two Russian journalists killed by mortar fire on June 17 in Metalist, near Lugansk. According to the prosecution, in short, Nadiya guided from her helicopter the artillery fire from on the ground.
Since then, Nadiya, he never stopped fighting her battle for freedom.
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After more than 40 days of hunger strike, Nadiya Savchenko, the Ukrainian Lieutenant imprisoned from July in Russia, has been transferred to a prison hospital in Moscow. Her health has deteriorated terribly and her life is at risk, but Nadiya does not intend to give up.
