A New Kremlin Show Trial In bizarre case, Ukrainian female fighter pilot is charged in the deaths of two Russian TV reporters By Philip Shishkin
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-kremlin-show-trial-1443827409
Nadya Savchenko, a Ukrainian officer, had finished tending to soldiers wounded in a firefight with pro-Russian separatists when her yellow scarf caught the eye of an enemy patrol in eastern Ukraine.
Lt. Savchenko, the first woman trained as a fighter pilot in Ukraine, surrendered at gunpoint. “Here she is,” one separatist said, “a woman sniper.”
The pro-Russian rebels yelled taunts, blindfolded her and forced her to her knees, according to a video from June 17, 2014, the day Lt. Savchenko began her perilous journey into Russia’s justice system.
She is accused of guiding a mortar attack that killed two Russian TV journalists that day in a criminal case that spans 39 volumes of evidence and testimony. Lt. Savchenko, who has been held in Russia for more than a year, is now on trial. She has denied the charges against her, but even her lawyers expect guilty verdicts and a lengthy prison term.
Her case illuminates the war in Ukraine—including the role of TV propaganda and the apparent involvement of Russian agents. To Kremlin critics, it also brings to light the revival of an old Soviet institution: the show trial, intended not to establish innocence or guilt, but to reinforce the party line and punish dissent. While Russia’s domestic opponents have faced such prosecutions for years, the war in Ukraine has added an extraterritorial dimension.
Lt. Savchenko’s lawyers said she was kidnapped in her own country and imprisoned abroad despite evidence the two TV journalists—on the hunt for combat footage—were hit by mortar fire after she was already taken prisoner.
In Ukraine, Lt. Savchenko, a 34-year-old woman who had long dreamed of flying planes, is a hero. When she first tried enrolling at the Kharkhiv Air Force Institute, Ukraine’s premier military pilot school, she was turned away because of her gender. She returned the following year, her mother said, and was advised to marry and have children instead. The third time, officials told her she should enlist in the regular army to prove her mettle, and she did.
After deployment to Iraq with a Ukrainian peacekeeping contingent, commanders told Lt. Savchenko that at age 24 she was too old to be a pilot. She then traveled to Kiev and successfully convinced the defense minister. After completing her pilot training, there were few opportunities to fly jet fighters. She became a helicopter navigator instead.
Early last year, Lt. Savchenko took a 12-day leave from her helicopter base in western Ukraine to join the swelling antigovernment street protests in Kiev. Then-President Viktor Yanukovych had just reversed a decision to sign an association agreement with the European Union, angering the opposition.
Out on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, Lt. Savchenko, her sister and mother joined the crowd, she later told Russian investigators. When Ukrainian security forces opened fire on demonstrators, people flocked to her mother’s apartment to rest, eat and wash their clothes.
In May 2014, Lt. Savchenko took another leave—this time to battle pro-Russian separatists because her helicopter unit wasn’t being deployed to the front.
ENLARGE On June 17, hours after her arrest, Lt. Savchenko was in a gym in Luhansk, handcuffed to a yellow piece of exercise equipment, under interrogation by pro-Russian separatists. Six days later, Lt. Savchenko was put in the back seat of a Soviet-made car. Armed insurgents piled in after her.
Over many hours, Lt. Savchenko was handed from one set of escorts to another, changing cars five times, she later testified in a deposition. She was blindfolded, and at one point a gunman tightened the blindfold with packing tape. “Don’t be scared,” he told her.
When the blindfold was finally removed, she saw cars with Russian license plates. She looked at the clock in her own car. It said midnight.
“Is this Moscow time?” she asked her escorts.
“Yes,” one answered.
The next months of her life would be dictated by decisions made in a tall, mirrored building in Moscow, headquarters of the Investigative Committee. With powers roughly equivalent to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the committee set up a special department last year to deal with “crimes connected with the use of banned means and methods of warfare.”
Vladimir Markin, the committee spokesman, declined to be interviewed or answer questions in writing. In public statements, he cited “irrefutable proof” of Lt. Savchenko’s complicity in the death of the two Russian journalists.
The lead reporter, Igor Korneliuk, had no experience working in war zones. Lanky and earnest, he spent most of his career in the Russian far North covering such stories as the discovery of bones from a prehistoric bison and the hunting rituals of the local indigenous people. Mr. Korneliuk’s sound engineer, Anton Voloshin, was a 27-year-old Muscovite who supplemented his TV income by working at a home-cinema store.
As the Kremlin ramped up its war in Ukraine in the spring of 2014, it enlisted state-owned media to help cast Ukraine’s fledgling government as the aggressor. Arriving in late May, Messrs. Korneliuk and Voloshin worked supporting that story line for one of Russia’s main TV channels, VGTRK Rossiya.
In one segment, Mr. Korneliuk interviewed a masked separatist saying Ukrainian forces were engaged in a “total cleansing campaign, slaughtering women and children, and all men aged 16 to 50.”
Among the first things Kremlin-backed separatists did after seizing Ukrainian towns was to disconnect Ukrainian channels and add Russian ones. The tactic, which involved technical specialists and equipment, worsened local fear of the Kiev government and its allegedly murderous acts.
On June 17, 2014, Mr. Korneliuk’s crew chased a tip that a mortar had struck an apartment block in Luhansk. The reporters drove around looking for damage. They finally drove to a rebel checkpoint just outside town. Messrs. Korneliuk and Voloshin ventured out on foot when distant artillery opened fire. Mr. Voloshin was killed instantly. Mr. Korneliuk died hours later.
In death, they joined the Russian narrative they had helped spread. But authorities needed a Ukrainian perpetrator to complete the story. Andrei Medvedev, a Rossiya TV political commentator, said in a documentary about the lead TV reporter: “He died because he came to Ukraine to tell the truth, and that is why he was intentionally murdered.”
Within a week of her capture, Lt. Savchenko was checked into a two-room suite at a motel on the highway just outside the Russian city of Voronezh.
Two armed guards wearing face masks settled in the anteroom. They positioned a mirror to be able to watch Lt. Savchenko in her room. The guards ordered food and when it arrived, they ate with Lt. Savchenko.
“They didn’t take off their masks,” she later testified, “just pulled them up to expose their mouths.”
The next day, an investigator from Moscow’s Investigative Committee arrived. “When I demanded to be allowed to call Ukraine and tell them I’ve been kidnapped and taken to Russia, he smiled and said that I’m a guest of Russia, but I can’t make any calls,” Lt. Savchenko said in her testimony.
The investigator told her that she was being held as a witness in a criminal probe against Ukraine’s interior minister and a governor who was bankrolling volunteer battalions. The Investigative Committee’s official transcripts of her motel interrogations focused on the conduct of war by the Ukrainian side with some questions about the journalists’ deaths. At one point, she was questioned with a polygraph.
On June 30, Lt. Savchenko was told she was no longer a witness and would instead be charged with being an accessory to murder.
Moscow has denied that Lt. Savchenko was seized in Ukraine. Russian officials said separatists released Lt. Savchenko after a few days of captivity, and she sneaked across the border into Russia, where she was arrested. The Investigative Committee also charged her with illegal border crossing.
Russian investigators built their case with evidence that includes a handwritten note of abbreviations and a doodle that, authorities said, was a map of the area, proving she was directing artillery fire. Two handwriting analyses commissioned by the investigative committee, however, concluded Lt. Savchenko likely wasn’t the author.
The pro-Russian separatists told investigators in testimony reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that at the time of her capture, she carried a pair of binoculars and a radio—evidence she was an artillery spotter. They couldn’t produce the equipment, saying the binoculars had been given to a rebel fighter.
In Moscow, a team of three lawyers led by Mark Feygin is working to defend Lt. Savchenko. Mr. Feygin, formerly a member of the Russian parliament, became well known in 2012 for representing the punk band Pussy Riot, whose members were jailed after performing an anti-Putin song in a Moscow church.
Mr. Feygin himself was questioned by the Investigative Committee about his participation in antigovernment protests during 2012. He also tussled with the committee during his defense of another Russian opposition activist, Leonid Razzvozhayev, now serving a 4½-year prison sentence for his role in the protests. Mr. Razzvozhayev also said he was kidnapped in Kiev and taken to Russia, an allegation Moscow denied.
“The Investigative Committee, they love me,” Mr. Feygin said during an interview in a Moscow courtyard where he was reviewing the Savchenko case with colleagues.
One defense attorney, Ilya Novikov, has focused on the two cellphones Lt. Savchenko carried when she was captured. The Russian journalists were killed around 11:40 a.m. But Lt. Savchenko’s phones were shown in central Luhansk at 10:44 a.m., around the spot where Lt. Savchenko was taken for interrogation, according to an analysis by the Security Service of Ukraine, tracking cellphone towers.
In Kiev, Mr. Novikov sent color-coded maps and pages of analysis to the Investigative Committee. Lt. Savchenko, he wrote, had been taken prisoner an hour before the mortar barrage that killed the two reporters.
The Investigative Committee didn’t dispute the underlying data, but surfaced its own expert. He testified that the cellphone relay station closest to the place of the journalists’ death had been damaged by a mortar and taken offline. That meant that Lt. Savchenko’s phones, unable to connect to the damaged station, pinged a tower much farther away, in central Luhansk.
Mr. Novikov, who enjoys riddles, continued to dig into the timing discrepancy. Lt. Savchenko’s detention, and the skirmishes preceding it, had been captured in short videos by a separatist fighter named Yegor Russky.
Would it be possible to use the position of the sun to determine the approximate time of Lt. Savchenko’s videotaped capture? Mr. Novikov wondered. There wasn’t enough light in that particular scene, which unfolds in a thicket, but another Russky video shows a tree casting a shadow.
By calculating the time between the videos, and using the tree as a sun dial, Mr. Novikov theorized Lt. Savchenko’s detention was videotaped between 10:20 a.m. and 10:40 a.m.—not between 1 and 2 p.m., as Mr. Russky said in his testimony. Like the cellphone tower analysis, this seemed to provide an alibi for Lt. Savchenko.
It is an elegant hypothesis but unlikely to sway the Investigative Committee. Mr. Russky, in a video posted on YouTube, says he stands by his testimony.
While imprisoned in Moscow, Lt. Savchenko began a hunger strike. When Lt. Savchenko, her health deteriorating, began eating again, her mother, Maria, traveled to see her, bringing homemade pies. Prison wardens refused to allow the pies, saying they might be poison, Maria Savchenko said.
In Kiev, Ukrainian officials are hoping for a prisoner exchange. Government security agents recently captured two men they described as active-duty Russian military intelligence officers. Ukrainian officials floated the idea of exchanging them for Lt. Savchenko, but the Kremlin disavowed the men.
In late July, Lt. Savchenko was taken by train to a small Russian town on the Ukraine border for her trial. The place is awash with pro-Russian separatist sympathizers—as unfriendly a site for her trial as one could find, her lawyers said. They bought their own flak jackets.
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