KYIV – Nadiya Savchenko is a woman of many firsts.
She is Ukraine’s first female military aviator and the first servicewoman to have received the nation’s highest honor – the golden star Hero of Ukraine medal.
She was also the most trusted politician in Ukraine, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, when Russian President Vladimir Putin released her in May, after holding her in captivity for nearly two years on trumped up charges, in exchange for two Russian intelligence operatives.
Now, Ms. Savchenko, 35, faces the dubious prospect of seeing her political star dim the fastest on record. She has faced a swirl of criticism from fellow lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada, including from the Batkivshchyna party on whose ticket she was elected in absentia, for secretly meeting with Kremlin-backed separatists in Minsk on December 11.
Ever since her release, she has advocated for dialogue with the Moscow-backed separatist leadership; she justified the meeting in Belarus as a step toward releasing prisoners of war and “strengthening” ongoing peace talks between Ukraine, Russia and its Donbas puppets.
Batkivshchyna disavowed her on the next day, stating that she was no longer part of the group. Meanwhile, other lawmakers, such as Anton Herashchenko of the People’s Front party, have called her an “agent” of Moscow. Her detractors have also called for her to be expelled from the Ukrainian Parliament’s National Security Committee, where she regularly has access to confidential information.
Even before these latest events, Ms. Savchenko’s rating had dipped to 2 percent, according to a late November survey conducted by the Rating sociological group.
Ms. Savchenko declined an interview request through Tetyana Protorchenko, her press secretary.
Her detractors say that by meeting with the Kremlin-backed separatists, Ms. Savchenko creates the illusion that the key to peace in war-torn Donbas lies with them, and that such overtures lend them legitimacy and undermine Kyiv’s efforts to hold Russia responsible for the war and keep Western sanctions in force as punishment.
Russia has invaded Ukraine twice since 2014. In March 2014, Moscow completed the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, and in April 2014, it engineered an armed uprising in the easternmost regions of Luhansk and Donetsk. Nearly 10,000 people have been killed since then, and more than 1.7 million people have been displaced, according to the United Nations.
Fellow lawmaker Andriy Teteruk, who like Ms. Savchenko fought in a volunteer battalion during the early phases of the Donbas war in 2014, said her actions “completely discredit all the efforts of the Ukrainian government” to negotiate a peace and exchange prisoners.
He added that the meeting with the “terrorists was reckless, shameful and extremely damaging to Ukraine [at every] step.”
In a briefing that Ms. Savchenko gave after the meeting, she rejected claims that she was lending credence to “terrorists.”
“Nobody can legalize what is illegal,” the former helicopter pilot said, referring to Ukrainian law that deems the two Russian proxy groups in the Donbas terrorist organizations.
Still, Moscow, which insists that the Donbas war is an indigenous, civil conflict, has constantly called for Kyiv to meet directly with its proxies to finally implement a truce that has never taken hold since it was brokered in February 2015. Russia, not its proxies, is a signatory of that peace accord.
As early as December 8, Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov repeated that stance in speaking to journalists in Hamburg while attending the yearly Ministerial Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
“There is no alternative to the direct talks between Kyiv and Donbas, mediated by the Trilateral contact group and Normandy format,” Mr. Lavrov said.
Ms. Savchenko further raised suspicions about her allegiance when she agreed to help establish a representative office for the Donetsk separatist proxy group in Kyiv during a meeting on December 12 with an actor posing as a separatist whom 1+1 channel’s “Hroshi” (Money) program hired and filmed with a hidden camera.
Her interlocutor proposed setting up the embassy under the guise of a cultural center.
“It’s too early for that. This project is feasible. It should start on St. Nicholas Day [December 19],” Ms. Savchenko said. “I’ll find a person, I even know this person, who can you help you with this project… If it starts with children, that’s good… people take kindly to children and women.”
In the same discussion, Ms. Savchenko told her interlocutor that she looks forward to meeting the Moscow-backed separatist leader of Donetsk again on December 23 in Minsk.
During the meeting, the 1+1 film crew noticed Ms. Savchenko was being surveilled by four people with identical boots, two of them inside the café where she was talking and two outside.
The Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, subsequently said that they weren’t monitoring her activities that day and that Ms. Savchenko didn’t inform the spy agency of her trip to Minsk earlier this month. As a lawmaker with access to state secrets, Ms. Savchenko must inform the SBU of all trips abroad in advance.
After the meeting, Ms. Savchenko said in an interview she gave to the 112 channel that she had asked another “intelligence service” agency, not the SBU, for protection before heading to the rendezvous.
Ms. Savchenko’s press secretary told The Ukrainian Weekly that the lawmaker’s dialogue was cut and spliced in the video. The Hero of Ukraine said it was not possible to set up a representative office, but only a “press office” for the separatists, according to the 112 interview.
In a separate interview she gave to Hromadske Radio, Ms. Savchenko, called 1+1 a “yellow” media outlet filled with “yellow” journalists.
Her behavior is reckless, political analyst Serhiy Postolovsky told Novoe Vremya magazine this week. “All that she does falls into the concept of ‘peace at all costs,’ ” he said.
Some say that the Kremlin’s proxies are getting desperate to cut some kind of deal after three years of war. Key figures, both Russians and Ukrainians, in the Donbas have been killed in the past year. The separatists lack status in Russia and have no hopes of getting amnesty from Ukrainian authorities. This might partially explain why they are eager talk to Ms. Savchenko.
“I believe they [separatists] are afraid,” said Taras Berezovets, founder of the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, a policy center. “The problem is they are under the control of the FSB [Russia’s KGB-successor agency], so I don’t think they can make any moves without their permission.”
Mr. Berezovets, a native of Crimea who had advised former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, added that Ms. Savchenko should be investigated for criminal wrongdoing and be stripped of her immunity from prosecution.
“Of course, she is not an agent of the FSB or other Russian intelligence services. But taking into account her ignorance, Russian intelligence agencies could’ve ‘brainwashed’ her,” Mr. Berezovets said. “There’s this notion of the ‘Manchurian Candidate’ – when a politician is completely under the influence of a foreign state. With Savchenko, we very well might have the same story.”
Defending her talks in Minsk and the subsequent meeting in Kyiv, Ms. Savchenko this week said that her actions are in line with the “Ukrainian people.”
Reacting to her meetings in the Belarusian capital, President Petro Poroshenko said they “benefit neither her personally nor Ukraine.” He added, “It is very unfortunate, because this person underwent great tribulations.”
Ms. Savchenko was a military officer for 10 years, becoming Ukraine’s first female pilot (with nine others following in her footsteps). She joined the volunteer Aidar Battalion during the early stages of the Donbas war. She was captured in Luhansk Oblast in the summer of 2014 and taken to Russia, where she was extrajudiciously tried for guiding artillery fire that allegedly led to the deaths of two Russian journalists. She was released in May during a prisoner exchange and the same month President Petro Poroshenko awarded her the Hero of Ukraine distinction. She is also a delegate to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.