Ukrainian Female Pilot Risks Dying of Illness in Russian Jail

A Ukrainian military pilot held by Russia has contracted acute pancreatitis and risks dying, weakened by an almost three-month hunger strike, her lawyer said.

Nadiya Savchenko, who says she was kidnapped by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine, learned Wednesday about her condition from doctors in the Moscow prison where she’s detained, lawyer Ilya Novikov said in an interview.

“There’s a serious risk to her life,” Novikov said. Savchenko is threatening to resume the hunger strike she partially ended March 5 unless Russia agrees to a visit by an international medical commission including Ukrainian doctors by March 16, he said. A renewed refusal to eat “could speed up the process” of her illness, the lawyer said.

Savchenko’s fate has become tied to the diplomatic push to end a yearlong conflict between government troops and separatists in eastern Ukraine. President Petro Poroshenko says he reached an agreement on her release during peace talks with Russia, Germany and France last month in Minsk, Belarus. The Kremlin denies this.

Russia has charged Savchenko, 33, with complicity in the deaths of two reporters, and a Moscow court on Tuesday extended her pre-trial detention until May 13. She denies she was involved.

Heroic Symbol

Savchenko, an officer in Ukraine’s army who served in Iraq, has become a symbol of heroism for many Ukrainians. She says she was abducted in eastern Ukraine by separatist rebels in June and taken across the border to Russia. In July, Investigative Committee, the country’s main body for criminal inquiries, said that she was detained after trying to enter Russia as a refugee.

Foreign ministers from 15 European Union states expressed solidarity last month with Savchenko, who was elected to Ukraine’s parliament in October. They appeared in a group photo with signs urging Russia to free the “illegally abducted Ukrainian pilot.”

Ambassadors from the U.S., Canada, Japan, Norway and several EU nations called for Savchenko’s “urgent” release at a meeting on Wednesday with Russia’s human rights commissioner, Ella Pamfilova, according to an e-mailed statement by the EU delegation in Moscow.