Nadiya Savchenko Gives Russia the Finger

Nadiya Savchenko Gives Russia the Finger

By Masha Gessen

Taken From: The New Yorker

On Wednesday, after Nadiya Savchenko blamed the Russian court for her own death, she climbed up on the wooden bench inside the cage in which she is being kept and showed her middle finger to the judicial bench. It was remarkable that she was able to do this, considering that she had had nothing to eat or drink in five days.

Savchenko is a Ukrainian military pilot accused by Russia of having directed artillery fire that killed two Russian state-television journalists at the positions of pro-Russia forces in eastern Ukraine, in June, 2014. She has been detained by Russia for twenty months, and in that time she has become an icon. She has since been elected to the Ukrainian parliament—and has also been made a permanent member of the Ukrainian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

In the two years since it invaded Ukraine, Russia has never admitted that it is fighting a war there. It is treating Savchenko as a common criminal, not a prisoner of war: she is charged with murder. The prosecution has asked that she be put away for twenty-three years. Savchenko denies that she was involved in the shots that caused the journalists’ deaths; she says she was captured an hour earlier. There is also dispute about her capture: Russia claims that, after the journalists were killed, Savchenko illegally crossed into Russian territory and was captured there. Savchenko says that she was seized on Ukrainian territory and then transferred to Russia—in other words, that she was either abducted by a foreign power or taken prisoner in a war. Savchenko has also stressed in her testimony that everything she did in the course of the fighting was done as part of her duties as a military pilot. If she were treated as a prisoner of war, Savchenko most likely could not be charged with murder—only with actions that led to the death of civilians.

There are international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners of war, and Savchenko’s defense has repeatedly protested the fact that they are not observed. But then again, there are international laws that govern the treatment of common criminals, and Russia systematically violates those, too. The European Court of Human Rights has regularly ruled against Russia on these grounds, but in the last couple of years Russia has increasingly ignored the court’s rulings. In fact, every year from 2011 through 2014, the court ruled that defendants should never be held in a cage in the courtroom. At least one Russian lawyer—one who has generally been critical of Russian court practices—has publicly asked why the Savchenko case has caused so much outrage. This is standard practice in Russian courts: they do the prosecution’s bidding, and the prosecution presents a half-baked or entirely manufactured case; they use and abuse their own procedure to humiliate the defendant.

Going back to the Soviet era, Russian political prisoners have struggled with the legal, ethical, political, and philosophical conundrum of being tried by a court whose legitimacy they cannot recognize. Some chose to use their trials solely as an opportunity to make public statements. In the current era, one of the imprisoned members of the protest-art group Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, used this approach: she would come to court with short prepared speeches and deliver them, in turn, every time she was asked a question. Others chose to point to the court’s lack of legitimacy and refused to engage with it—in the current era, another imprisoned Pussy Riot member, Maria Alekhina, made the act of turning her back to the court’s video camera an art form (she was meant to testify via an uplink from jail).

Nadiya Savchenko has used both of these strategies. She has given speeches and sung the Ukrainian anthem in her cage, and supporters in the courtroom have joined her in what might be called a rousing rendition. She has also repeatedly pointed out that the court had no right to put her on trial. In her last final statement Wednesday, she did both. “I admit no guilt and I recognize neither the court nor the verdict,” she said. “If I am found guilty, I will not appeal. I want the entire democratic world to understand that Russia is a Third World country with a totalitarian regime and a petty tyrant for a dictator and it spits on international law and human rights.” But she has also found one more, radical strategy: unless the Russian authorities begin force-feeding her or agree to release her (possibly as part of a trade), then she will deprive the Russian court of the object of its actions: by the time her sentence is read on March 21st or 22nd, she will be dead. “Russia will return me to Ukraine yet,” she said in her closing statement. “Whether I am dead or alive, it will return me.”