Ukraine’s SBU security service has arrested the former Ukrainian military pilot and lawmaker Nadiya Savchenko on charges of plotting to carry out an attack against the Verkhovna Rada and civilians in the center of Kyiv.
Savchenko was arrested on March 22, right after the parliament voted to approve three requests made by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko: to strip Savchenko of her immunity from prosecution, allow her to be detained, and to arrest her.
Savchenko didn’t deny the allegations, although she called them “a political provocation and surrealism.”
According to Lutsenko, Savchenko, together with the head of the Officers Corp organization and a mediator in prisoner swaps between Ukraine and Russian-led forces in Donbas Volodymyr Ruban, in the middle of 2017 conspired with the leaders of the Russian-led separatists in Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts, plotting attacks, and smuggling weapons from the occupied territories of Donbas.
Lutsenko said that the SBU found out about their plans from four Ukrainian army officers from the western city of Khmelnytskyi whom Savchenko and Ruban allegedly tried to recruit. The officers pretended to accept the proposal from Savchenko, and reported it to the SBU, which tracked and recorded their preparations for the attacks, Lutsenko said.
Lutsenko told lawmakers that their plan was to blow up the government and guest seating areas of parliament, then destroy the Rada ceiling using mortars, and to finish off all the lawmakers who survived by shooting them with machine guns. They would also bombard the governmental block of the city with shells fired from a mortar set up on Trukhaniv island in the center of Kyiv, Lutsenko said.
As evidence, Lutsenko showed lawmakers a video in which Savchenko and Ruban discuss the plan of the future attack with two Ukrainian soldiers on Dec. 1 at a military base in Khmelnytskyi.
Savchenko says she wants to launch an attack inside the parliament building on a day when all the ministers, force services and lawmakers gather to listen to the president’s report. She says she plans to use eight grenades for the attack, which will cause the large chandelier fall from the ceiling. If the plan doesn’t work, she says she can shoot with an assault rifle.
“I suggest a coup d’état. They should be removed physically. And all at once. On one day and from the inside,” Savchenko says in the video.
One of the soldiers asks Savchenko and Ruban who will execute the attack and Savchenko confirms she will.
“That’s her (Savchenko’s) dream,” Ruban says.
Lutsenko said Ruban and Savchenko smuggled the first batch of weapons from the occupied territories of Donbas in late November, and then decided to get more.
Ruban was arrested at the Mayorsk checkpoint near the Russian-occupied city of Horlivka in Donetsk Oblast some 580 kilometers southeast of Kyiv on March 8 while allegedly trying to smuggle the second batch of weapons into Ukrainian-controlled territory. He is accused of possessing illegal firearms, preparing terror attacks and attempting to assassinate President Petro Poroshenko and the country’s top officials.
In the vote to strip Savchenko of immunity, 291 lawmakers voted for, with only eight people opposing, six of whom are members of the Opposition Bloc faction, an offshoot of the Party of Regions – the party of Ukraine’s ousted President Viktor Yanukovych.
The same lawmakers voted against her arrest.
According to Savchenko, the only way for lawmakers, and for Ukraine, to avoid “terrorist attacks and hard situations” is to change the electoral legislation, change the constitution, and give the nation more powers to make decisions about the state.
“You’re making anti-heroes of yesterday’s heroes only because they don’t agree with the political system,” she said in parliament on March 22.
Savchenko was captured by Russian-backed separatists in June 2014 in Luhansk Oblast, transported to Russia, and imprisoned on bogus charges. She was released after almost two years in exchange for two Russian intelligence officers captured in Ukraine. She was returned to Ukraine in a presidential plane in May 2016.
While in jail in Russia, she became a Batkivshchyna Party lawmaker. The party, led by Ukraine’s ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, expelled Savchenko in late 2016 after the news broke that she had held a secret meeting with the leaders of the Kremlin-installed occupation authorities in the Donbas.
