Jailed Pilot Savchenko Freed by Russia, Expected in Kiev Shortly
Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko has been freed after nearly two years in a Russian prison and is expected to return to a hero's welcome to Kiev shortly, defense laywers said Wednesday.
Savchenko's defense team confirmed Savchenko was on her way to Ukraine and thanked the pilot's supporters. "She is on her way home, to Ukraine," lawyer Mark Feigin said on Twitter.
Another lawyer, Nikolai Polozov, added: "It's been a long and complicated road. But we have been able to prove that there are no insurmountable tasks and we've managed to free the hostage from the jaws of Mordor," referring to a savage land in author J.R. Tolkien's fictional region of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Savchenko was expected to land in Kiev on Wednesday afternoon, a source in the presidential guard told AFP, while two more sources said she would be decorated by President Petro Poroshenko.
Earlier in the day two alleged Russian soldiers, Aleksandr Aleksandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev, sentenced by Ukraine to 14 years in prison for fighting in the rebel-held east, left Ukraine, opening the way for a swap with Savchenko, Yerofeyev's lawyer Oksana Sokolovska told AFP.
"Yerofeyev and Aleksandrov are no longer in Ukraine, which means that the pardoning has taken place," Sokolovska said.
"They have already crossed Ukraine's border."
Ukraine said the men were in Russian military intelligence, but Moscow denied they were serving army officers, insisting they had quit the military before heading to fight in Ukraine as volunteers.
The presidential motorcade has already arrived at Kiev's main Boryspil airport, an AFP reporter said from the scene.
- Symbol of resistance -
A state official said that the motorcade would pick up Savchenko and take her to the presidential office where she was to be decorated by Poroshenko later in the day.
Savchenko was in March convicted over the killing of two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine and sentenced to 22 years in a Russian prison. She had been held in captivity in Russia since June 2014.
The crop-haired military helicopter pilot denies any involvement in the shelling deaths of two Russian state television reporters.
While in prison, she launched several hunger strikes to protest her detention, refusing both food and water.
Savchenko -- who was fighting in a pro-Kiev militia group against rebels in east Ukraine -- insists she was kidnapped by separatist fighters before the journalists were killed in June 2014 and then illegally smuggled to Russia.
In Ukraine, she has become a symbol of resistance against what Kiev calls Moscow's aggression in the east and has been elected to parliament in absentia.
Kiev and its Western allies view Savchenko as the latest pawn in Moscow's broader aggression against Ukraine that has seen Russia seize the Crimean peninsula and fuel the separatist uprising.
Kiev has long been pushing for a prisoner swap to free Savchenko, and Poroshenko said in late April that he hoped she would return home "in a few weeks."
Source: Agence France Presse
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