The Russian servicemen – Alexander Alexandrov and Yevgeny Yerofeyev – were sentenced on April 18 by a Kiev court to 14 years for “armed aggression”.
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Poroshenko said last month that he and Russian President Vladimir Putin had reached a deal to free Savchenko and indicated that she would be swapped for the two Russian servicemen.
A Ukrainian pilot convicted of murdering two Russian journalists in 2014 was released from Russian captivity on Wednesday and flown back to Ukraine.
Ukrainian servicewoman Nadiya Savchenko talks to the media at Boryspil International airport outside Kiev, Ukraine, May 25, 2016.
Savchenko, who spent almost two years in a Russian prison, landed in Kiev on Wednesday, President Petro Poroshenko’s Twitter account said.
The World Weekly previously reported on Ms. Savchenko conviction.
“I want you to feel this right now-I spent nearly two years in a single cell!”, she shouted into the microphone, growing emotional.
Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko made her first speech upon the return home from Russian prison. She was swapped for two Russians convicted of fighting alongside pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Putin said the widows had contacted him “with a request to pardon Savchenko” after a meeting with pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk.
The exchange was agreed during a telephone conversation between Putin, Poroshenko, Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande.
Feygin tweeted on Wednesday that Savchenko was innocent of any crime, saying she had nothing to do with the deaths of the two journalists, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin, who were working for state TV.
The two Russians, Captain Yerofeyev and Sergeant Alexandrov, were wounded and captured by the Ukrainian army in fighting near the government-held city of Schastya in May 2015. They were met by their wives and declined to speak publicly to Russian state journalists on the tarmac.
Ukraine said the pair were elite members of Russian military intelligence – but Russia insisted they were not on active duty when they were captured in eastern Ukraine.
Savchenko’s defence team confirmed Savchenko was on her way to Ukraine and thanked the pilot’s supporters.
“It’s been a long and complicated road”, one of her lawyers, Nikolai Polozov, told AFP. “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. “They have already crossed Ukraine’s border”.
As for Crimea, in March 2014 at least 97 percent of its residents voted for rejoining Russian Federation in a referendum after rejecting a coup-imposed government that took power in Kiev in February 2014 and seeing the example of Kiev’s military crackdown on the dissenting eastern Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
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The daily also said that a Russian aircraft carrying Alexandrov and Yerofeev also left for Moscow.
