Two Ukrainian soldiers killed in war-torn east

The Ukrainian State Border Service said that Ukrainian border guards did not open fire at Russian citizens from the Ukrainian territory near the Krasna Talivka border checkpoint, calling this incident a provocative act.

The two Russian journalists were killed in shelling at 11.40 hrs outside Luhansk in June 2014.

The government in Kiev faces a challenge in that there are strong ultranationalist forces at play who are eager to confront Russia and the separatists, holding long-standing historical grudges against Moscow over actions that go back to the very founding days of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed.

Savchenko was shuttled out of Moscow two weeks ago to the Russian town of Donetsk, about 950 kilometers from Moscow and near the border with Ukraine.

“She is okay”, lawyer Mark Feigin said on Twitter.

Shell in Debaltseve, Eastern Ukraine – February 2015 “After a year of conflict, many communities in eastern Ukraine have been exposed to extreme levels of violence with heavy weapons, the remnants of which have been left behind in devastated towns and villages”.

Preliminary hearings on Savchenko’s case began in the Donetsk city court on July 30.

Her relatives say she was spirited out of Ukraine illegally into Russian Federation by the rebels.

Few doubt that the Ukrainian pilot’s fate will really be decided in the Kremlin, and Western leaders and Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine have repeatedly called on Putin to let her go.

The defence argues that phone bills confirmed she had already been taken prisoner by separatists when the journalists died, and was taken to Russian Federation against her will.

Russian justice denied Savchenko a trial by jury, which statistically is more likely to deliver a not guilty verdict. Since her arrest, Savchenko has been elected as a deputy in Ukraine’s Parliament and is a delegate to the Council of Europe, giving her diplomatic immunity.

“The sentence has already been approved and it will be as hard as possible”, Novikov said.

Savchenko was one of the first Ukrainian women to train as an air force pilot and served in Iraq for six months. In April this year Kiev imposed sanctions on Russian Federation over the militant’s detention.

State security chief Vasyl Hrytsak told reporters that Vladimir Starkov, 37, from Russia’s Kirov region, had admitted immediately he was a serving soldier in the Russian armed forces after he was stopped in a truck at a checkpoint 22 km outside the separatist-held city of Donetsk.