Savchenko arrested on terrorism charges with parliamentary approval

Ukraine’s parliament voted on March 22 to remove the political
immunity of MP Nadiya Savchenko in order to allow for her arrest and
prosecution for terrorism-related charges. 291 MPs voted to open a criminal
case against Savchenko (out of a 226-vote minimum majority), 277 MPs voted to
detain her and 268 MPs voted to arrest her.

Ahead of the votes, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko
presented 28 minutes of three days’ worth of video evidence gathered by secret
surveillance that showed Savchenko explaining her plot to violently overthrow
the Ukrainian government, including planning bombings inside the parliament
building and a mortar attack on the Kyiv city center. At one moment, she
rejects her accomplice’s proposal for a widescale revolution, instead
suggesting a swift overthrow. “They need to be eliminated physically,” she
said. “All of them and quickly, at that.” Among these she planned to have
assassinated are President Petro Poroshenko, National Security and Defense
Council Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov and Interior Minister Arsen Avakov.

In response to the charges against her, Savchenko
criticized the government as an evil force that is working against peace. She
criticized her colleagues in parliament for failing to make enough efforts to
stop the warfare in Donbas and continuing to indulge in corruption.  She
accused Lutsenko and his fellow EuroMaidan activists of doing the same thing in
overthrowing the Yanukovych government that she had planned, essentially
repeating a Kremlin talking point. The difference is that they succeeded “but
the people didn’t succeed,” she said, casting herself as the people’s
representative in warning that the Ukrainian people will be the biggest threat
to parliament, not her. She refused to surrender her Hero of Ukraine award that
she gained from the president during her incarceration in Russia as a war
prisoner.

Zenon Zawada: In the big
picture, what’s most important from these events is the information that has
been revealed from the recordings of Savchenko planning her coup with her
accomplices. Savchenko, who was in close contact with self-declared Donetsk
People’s Republic leader Aleksandr Zakharchenko, revealed that his ideal
scenario is to be reintegrated into Ukraine, but without the current government
in place. Savchenko planned to kill Ukraine’s leaders in order to fulfill this
goal, though it remains unclear whether Zakharchenko had any realistic hope for
Savchenko to succeed or merely allowed her to fall victim to her own delusions.
Savchenko also reveals, through her interactions with Zakharchenko, that Russia
is not interested in annexing its occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Our best explanation for these bizarre events is that
Savchenko is an idealist of the extreme kind who is incapable of applying a
rational framework to her motives of punishing evildoers. It’s this reckless,
unbounded idealism that led her to join Ukrainian paramilitary forces in
Donbas, to repeatedly defy the Russian government with risky hunger strikes and
now to overthrow a Ukrainian government that she accuses of killing its own
citizens by waging this war in Donbas.

We expect Savchenko will be prosecuted and convicted
of her crimes, receiving a harsh prison sentence despite her apparent cognitive
deficiencies. The Ukrainian government will have to make an example of her to
dissuade any other paramilitaries or separatists from considering similar
overthrow attempts. Only until after the war is over, and the Russian threat
neutralized, can she hope to be released, possibly on the basis of her
cognitive deficiencies.

Needless to say, this is an incredibly tragic turn
of events after Savchenko had become an international hero in her defiant stand
against her illegal arrest and incarceration by the Russian government. Now she
stands accused of plotting to overthrow the Ukrainian government, which could
imprison her for life, far longer the 22-year sentence imposed by the Russian
courts.