Ukrainian pilot Savchenko in court for pre-trial hearing

As for the July 26 incident involving a KAMAZ truck with weapons which was allegedly detained by Ukrainian border guards the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) called it as being “staged by the Ukrainian security services”.

The website of Ukraine’s Novoye Vremya weekly published today the transcript of what it said was a conversation between two pro-Russian insurgents who had just learned of Starkov’s detention.

On top of that, Donetsk has no jail and Savchenko would be transported to hearings from Novocherkassk, a city located about two hours away by auto.

Two Russian journalists were killed in a mortar attack last June, which prosecutors allege she helped target. “He said that while delivering the ammunition they had got lost”.

Novikov said he had serious doubts about the fairness of the trial she would receive in Russian Federation.

Russian prosecutors accuse Ms Savchenko of her involvement in the killing of the journalists in her capacity as a volunteer in a Ukrainian battalion. If proved guilty, the former pilot is likely to face up to 25 years in prison.

“Nadezhda Viktorovna Savchenko has been brought to the Donetsk city court”, a court spokeswoman told reporters, referring to the Ukrainian woman by her Russian name.

Preliminary hearings in the case of Nadia Savchenko, 34, who has become a symbol of resistance in Ukraine to Russian support for separatists in the east, are scheduled for Thursday in the Rostov region in southern Russia. 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.

“According to the billing of Savchenko’s two telephones, the first telephone was registered at the centre of Luhansk at 10.44 hrs”, Novikov said.

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

“We’ll be working on the assumption that the sentence has already been written and it’s the harshest possible”.

In an interview with a Ukrainian newspaper in 2009, she said she could go without sleep for five days and had no problem sharing a room at night “with 25 guys”.

The entire separatist region – about the size of Wales – accounted for just 2.6 percent of Ukraine’s population but 15 percent of its industrial production before the war broke out with Kiev’s new pro-Western government in April 2014.