Tuesday 31 May 2016

Savchenko is freed

At last! Ukrainian officer Nadiya Savchenko was freed by Russian authority and came back to Ukraine! Having been captured in Luhansk region in Ukraine and illegally transported to Russia in June of 2014, Savchenko was also unlawfully imprisoned almost two years in Russian jails and was sentenced to 22 years in jail by Russian court. On 25th May 2016 President of Russian Federation Vladimir Putin signed decree of pardon of Nadiya Savchenko and explained his decision with the pardon request of the relatives of one of two Russian journalists, with whose murder she had been charged (though N. Savchenko had been captivated 1 hour and a half before the time of the death of these journalists).
And also on 25th May 2016 it was published the pardon of President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko for Russian soldiers Alexander Aleksandrov and Yevgeniy Yerofeyev, who had been arrested in Luhansk region by Service of Security of Ukraine in May of 2015 and had been as an obvious example of Russian army’s presence in Donbas region of Ukraine. Having been sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment for terroristic activity in Ukraine, they were set free and flew to Moscow on the plane after their pardon. On the same day Nadiya Savchenko arrived in Kyiv, so it looked like the exchange of soldiers between two countries which are in military conflict.
People's deputy of Batkivshchyna political party in High Council of Ukraine and the member of Ukrainian permanent delegation in Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Nadiya Savchenko held a press conference after her return to Ukraine on 27th May 2016, answering the questions of journalists. And on 31st May 2016 she came in Ukrainian parliament at first in the life and opened parliamentary sitting like people’s deputy. Making speech, N. Savchenko thanked all Ukrainians and all people around the world for supporting her and sang Ukrainian state anthem after speech. Then she took off poster “Freedom for Savchenko” from parliament’s rostrum and instead of it hung another poster “Freedom for prisoners of Kreml” with painted faces of several dozens Ukrainian political prisoners and said that Ukrainian people’s deputies hadn’t right not to free them.
Because many other Ukrainian citizens are staying in Russian jails nowadays, being politically persecuted. For example, Oleh Sentsov, Oleksandr Kolchenko, Hennadiy Afanasyev, Oleksiy Chyrniy, Valentyn Vyhovskyy, Oleksandr Kostenko, Yuriy Ilchenko, citizens of Ukraine and settlers of Crimean peninsula, who were arrested by Russian police in the Crimea in 2014-2015 after Russian occupation of Ukrainian Autonomous Republic of Crimea in spring of 2014. There were different reasons of their arrests and they were jailed, because current state power of Russian Federation considers Crimean land Russian territory and correspondently considers these persons Russian citizens, so judges them according to Russian legislation. So here are not just criminal deals and political persecutions against some people, but there are also the problem of the Crimea and various opinions of Ukrainian and Russian authorities on the question of whose territory is this peninsula.

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