Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko wasted no time Tuesday criticizing Ukrainian lawmakers after she was sworn in as a member of Parliament following her release in a prisoner swap with Russian Federation last week.
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Ms Savchenko said: “Let’s put it this way: Ukrainians, if you need me to be the president, OK, I will be president”. “Nothing is forgiven. And the Ukrainian people will not let us sit in these seats if we betray them”.
Savchenko was elected as a lawmaker in 2014 while she was in custody. Her popularity and defiance could, however, pose a threat to President Petro Poroshenko’s government at a moment of low popularity and widespread unhappiness about the slow pace of reforms in Ukraine.
Savchenko also said that the members of parliament remind her of “lazy schoolchildren”.
She was pardoned last week by Russian President Vladimir Putin as part of a prisoner swap, after a defiant period in custody which included several hunger strikes. Savchenko appears for her first session at the Ukrainian parliament as a lawmaker in former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko’s party on Tuesday.
“I want to apologise to all the mothers whose children haven’t returned from the anti-terrorist operation that I survived. But if I need to, I’ll do everything, I’ll go down this road”.
Ukrainian pilot and Member of Parliament Nadiya Savchenko (Right) (Reuters photo).
Savchenko has turned into a national symbol of resistance to Russian Federation since joining a volunteer battalion fighting pro-Kremlin eastern separatist insurgents and then being taken prisoner in June 2014. She mysteriously emerged in a Russian detention centre and was sentenced to 22-years imprisonment for her alleged role in the murder of two Moscow state television journalists covering the war in July 2014.
She denies the claim and argued she had already been captured during the clash over disputed territory in Ukraine’s east by the time the two men were killed. Since then, she has become regarded by many Ukrainians as a hero.
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A rebel fighter who identified himself by the nom de guerre Moskva (Moscow) said the Ukrainian assault began from positions just north of Donetsk last Saturday.
