Russian court delivers verdict in Ukraine pilot trial

A Russian court began on Monday delivering its verdict in the high-profile murder trial of Ukrainian helicopter pilot Nadiya Savchenko, which Kiev and the West have slammed as a political sham.

Prosecutors are demanding a 23-year jail term for Savchenko's alleged involvement in the killing of two Russian state TV journalists in war-torn eastern Ukraine in 2014.

Few doubt that the 34-year-old combat helicopter navigator will be found guilty, and Kiev is already pushing for a prisoner swap.

The judge began by reading the prosecution indictment which contained allegations that Savchenko acted as a "spotter" in the fatal shelling of journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin in June 2014, just two months after the start of the pro-Kremlin uprising in Ukraine's industrial east.

At the time, she was serving in a volunteer pro-Kiev battalion fighting the insurgents.
An AFP correspondent was barred from the  courtroom in the southern Russian town of Donetsk and early reports from Russian new agencies wrongly said Savchenko had been found guilty.

The reading of the verdict is set to last through Tuesday.  

"You heard the first introductory and explanatory parts, some media hurried with the guilty verdict," Savchenko's lawyer Mark Feigin told journalists during a break in proceedings.   

"It will be guilty of course, you need not doubt that, there is no doubt and there will be a long sentence."

Russian state television, however, continued reporting a guilty verdict against Savchenko, who has become a national hero at home and been elected to parliament in absentia.

She insists she was kidnapped by pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine before the journalists were killed and then illegally smuggled over the border into Russia before being slapped with false charges.
Ukraine's pro-Western President Petro Poroshenko has pledged to do "everything possible" to bring Savchenko back home and mooted a prisoner swap to free her.

Kiev is holding two men it says were Russian soldiers serving in the east of the country, who could provide Poroshenko with a possible bargaining chip.

But Moscow is also thought to have at least 10 other Ukrainians behind bars -- including high-profile detainees like film director Oleg Sentsov -- and the Kremlin has given little hint it is ready to play ball.
 

- Western pressure -

Savchenko has struck a defiant figure throughout the long months of her detention, which saw her sent to a psychiatric hospital near Moscow before being transferred close to the Ukraine border for her trial in the town of Donetsk.  

She has repeatedly gone on hunger strike to protest her conditions -- fasting for more than 80 days at one point and going almost a week without food and water at another.
Usually dressed in a traditional Ukrainian blouse or pro-Kiev T-shirt, Savchenko has ridiculed the court from the glass defendant's cage and flashed her middle finger at the judges as the trial ended.

"All I can do is to show by example that Russia, with its overbearing state and totalitarian regime, can be crushed if you are not afraid or broken," Savchenko said in her closing statement on March 9.

Ties between Moscow and Kiev are already in tatters over the 2014 seizure of Crimea and the subsequent separatist insurgency in the east.

A complex political process to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine has stalled as Kiev and Moscow accuse each other of failing to live up to promises made in a peace deal signed over a year ago.

Russia has meanwhile thrust its way back to the centre of the international diplomacy with its air campaign in Syria, prompting some in Kiev to fear the West might ease the pressure over Ukraine.

A guilty verdict and harsh sentence for Savchenko could refocus Western attention, however, and Kiev is pushing for sanctions on some 40 people it says are "directly involved" in Savchenko's case.
Source: AFP