Savchenko launches first hunger strike in Ukrainian prison

Nadiya Savchenko, the former political prisoner in
Russia who allegedly plotted to overthrow the Ukrainian government, started on
March 24 her first hunger strike after having been imprisoned two days earlier.
She has no complaints after her health and expressed her concern about being
video-recorded without her permission, said the newly appointed human rights
ombudsman Liudmyla Denysova, who confirmed no recordings. Before beginning her
hunger strike, Savchenko mocked Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko as a
“weakling” for his claim that he starved for 30 days when being imprisoned
under the Yanukovych administration.

Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of the Fatherland party
that gave Savchenko a parliamentary seat while she was imprisoned before
revoking it owing to her controversial acts afterwards, said Savchenko should
have undergone extended psychological rehabilitation after her release from
imprisonment in Russia in May 2016. “When Nadiya returned home – having
undergone colossal stresses, abuses, hunger, derisions, including fear … a
lengthy psychological rehabilitation was supposed to have been required,”
Tymoshenko told reporters on March 23.

The Russian government didn’t recruit Savchenko into
its intelligence services during her imprisonment in Russia, Presidential
Administration Head Dmitry Peskov said in an interview on Russian television
broadcast on March 24. He called such claims “complete nonsense” after
Poroshenko Bloc MP Ivan Vynnyk expressed his confidence that that had occurred.

Savchenko is charged with acting with the goal of
violently overthrowing the constitutional order and taking over the government,
threatening the life of a state official, preparing terrorist acts, supporting
terrorist organizations and illegally possessing firearms, armaments and
explosives. She faces a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Zenon Zawada: We expect
Savchenko will become a central theme in the 2019 presidential campaign, with
Poroshenko taking the position that Savchenko is a traitor who deserves to be
punished to the full extent of the law. Meanwhile, the Russian-oriented
candidates will defend Savchenko, backing her calls for compromise with the
separate republics, as well as her criticisms of the current regime’s
corruption. It’s worth noting that the two leading Russian-oriented
presidential candidates – natural gas trader Yuriy Boyko and media mogul Vadim
Rabinovich – both voted in parliament against Savchenko’s arrest. Their
parties, and their mass media, will use Savchenko’s imprisonment in Ukraine as
part of a new propaganda campaign – in loose cooperation with the Kremlin – to
discredit the Ukrainian government internationally.

We expect Tymoshenko will take a centrist position
based on her March 23 statement, calling for punishment yet at the same time
hinting at Savchenko’s psychological and cognitive deficiencies. Tymoshenko
will instead focus on her bread-and-butter issues of raising living standards
and improving state social payments, which is a winning strategy, according to
recent polls.

The situation with Savchenko has taken on surreal
dimensions, which she has herself acknowledged. Now Ukrainian President
Poroshenko is faced with the media storm that will surround Savchenko
throughout the election campaign, with the possibility that she will harm
herself with a hunger strike. Poroshenko will have to find a way to capitalize
politically off Savchenko’s imprisonment, while ensuring that she doesn’t harm
herself critically, which will be humiliating on an international scale after
all the sympathy she generated during her repeated hunger strikes while
imprisoned in Russia. While Poroshenko was able to rid himself of his
“Saakashvili problem” by deporting him (illegally, critics argue), he
won’t be able to do the same with Savchenko, a Ukrainian citizen.