Preliminary hearing underway for Ukrainian pilot in Russia

SBU officials say Starkov and another man who said he was a separatist fighter lost their way and driven towards Ukrainian forces manning the checkpoint.

The incident took place in Russia’s southern Rostov region near the Krasnaya Talovka checkpoint at the Russian-Ukrainian border.

The United States imposed further Russia and Ukraine-related sanctions on Thursday, adding associates of a billionaire Russian gas trader, Crimean port operators and former Ukrainian officials to its list of those it is penalizing in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Court representative Tatyana Diyeva told reporters that the court has adjourned the hearings and sent the appeal to the regional court to decide where the case should be heard.

Earlier this year, Savchenko spent 83 days on a hunger strike to protest her detention, but under pressure from her family and supporters she started drinking milk and eating cheese in March. Friends and family convinced her to eat again after her weight dropped significantly and her health deteriorated.

The lawyer of Nadezhda Savchenko, Mark Feygin speaks to press… “She is a very purposeful and, I would say, stubborn person”. “But not a person who is completely uninvolved with the crime”.

“For the first time in Ukraine’s history, its head of state and government are ceding a large degree of their powers to the regions”, he wrote on his Facebook page. He said that while delivering the ammunition they had got lost,”Oleksandr Tomchyshyn, a border guards spokesman said”.

Russia denies accusations from the Ukrainian government and other Western leaders that it is helping rebels, saying that any Russians acting with separatists are volunteers.

The high-profile trial of a Ukrainian pilot detained for more than a year has opened in Russian Federation. “An armed man in fatigues came up to them from the Ukrainian side to a distance of about 30 meters and shouted ‘Stop, ‘” Markin said.

[Nadiya Savchenko, the prisoner at the center of Ukraine’s cease-fire deal].

Moscow is prosecuting her despite diplomatic immunity she enjoys as a lawmaker and a member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

But Moscow quickly shot down those hopes, declaring hers is a criminal case and that she was not detained illegally. Thursday’s move signals “the long-term nature of the sanction environment for Russian Federation“, commented Dmitry Dolgin, a bank analyst in Moscow, to Reuters Friday.

More than 6,500 people have been killed since pro-Russian rebels launched their insurgency in April 2014, and a February truce agreement has failed to stop the fighting.