On June 20, the rebels handed Savchenko over to Russian intelligence officers, who put a sack on her head and secretly transferred her to Russia. Russian authorities insist that she crossed the border voluntarily, without documents, in the guise of a refugee — which is a lie.
Savchenko is being held in a civilian prison in Moscow, where she has begun a hunger strike to protest her illegal detention. As Putin confirmed at his news conference, she is accused under the Russian criminal code of complicity in the June 17 killing of two Russian journalists, who died during a mortar attack on separatist positions outside Luhansk. Russian propaganda portrays her as a murderer and a terrorist.
Savchenko’s innocence of this charge can be easily established: Telephone logs show that she was captured an hour before the attack that killed the journalists. But that is not the point. Under the Geneva Conventions, she cannot be charged with a criminal offense at all. If she did anything wrong, she is answerable only to international justice under the laws of war.
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