The Many Faces of Nadia Savchenko

2016/7/23 13:59:12

"There can be peace [in Ukraine] only through war," she said. "Victory doesn't have to be categorical; it can be agreeable and merciful. But we cannot surrender without a fight."

 


BY CHRISTOPHER MILLER for RFE/RL, July 2016:

 

KYIV Nadia Savchenko had been in the air for nearly an hour when the pilot radioed to the cabin that they had reached Ukrainian airspace. She took a deep breath and then joined the others on board in celebrating her freedom with a shot of vodka. After almost two years of sobriety, the alcohol gave her a rush. She thirsted for more, but was told not to drink too much before facing journalists and delivering a statement with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko. Savchenko, however, wasn't listening.

 

"I picked up the bottle and took as much as I wanted," she told me during an interview in Kyiv. Then she slammed down the bottle and went to smoke, taking long, deep drags on a cigarette in a small corridor at the back of the president's plane. Nobody, it seemed, wanted to be the one to stop her.

 

The plane soon touched down at Kyiv's Boryspil International Airport. As she was reunited with her family, Savchenko, a Ukrainian military helicopter navigator who spent nearly two years in Russian captivity, donned a white T-shirt adorned with the Ukrainian trident. Elated supporters lined up to greet her with bouquets of flowers. One of them was Yulia Tymoshenko, once a political prisoner herself, a former prime minister who famously adopted a peasant's braid to appeal to voters and now the leader of the Fatherland party on whose list Savchenko was elected to parliament. Savchenko turned away the bouquet from Tymoshenko and dodged her attempt to go in for a hug. "We aren't well enough acquainted," Savchenko told her.

 

Savchenko didn't want to be a part of anyone's photo op. She removed her shoes and started to walk barefoot along the runway. A mob of reporters took notice, as did the thousands watching a live stream of the event. Her bare feet and erratic behavior led many to comment on social media that she might have lost her mind in prison. Her first words were a warning for reporters: "Back up…. I'm not used to so many people being around." For Savchenko, though, there was nothing strange about removing her shoes. It was something that she had done before. "I love the feeling of the concrete under my feet, the smell of spilled jet fuel," she said.

 

After 708 days behind bars, many Ukrainians' hopes and prayers had been answered. Savchenko, a woman who became a symbol of Ukrainian resilience in the face of Russian aggression and whose first name means "hope" in Ukrainian, had finally come home.

 

Like many homecomings, Savchenko's has been bittersweet. Now under the public microscope as a parliamentary deputy, a neophyte in Ukraine's notoriously rough-and-tumble political life, Savchenko will inevitably struggle to maintain the sky-high popularity she enjoyed while a martyr in prison. And while the mostly hagiographical accounts in Ukrainian media have led the public to dub her Ukraine's Joan of Arc, after the French heroine who was burned at the stake, the reality of Savchenko is much more complex: a firebrand fraught with flaws and contradictions, uncompromising, troubled, and hard to pin down.

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I first met Savchenko on a hot June day two weeks after her release. When Savchenko and I sat down at the RFE/RL studio in Kyiv, she apologized for being late. That morning, she had left the family apartment where she has lived since her release to begin another day of meetings with government officials and journalists. Along the way she kept having to stop to take impromptu selfies with adoring fans. "People tell me, 'My friends won't believe [I met you] if I don't have a photograph with you,'" Savchenko said, rolling her eyes.

 

Savchenko, who is 35, was accompanied by her younger sister, Vira, who has become a guardian of sorts, dealing with the public and the press as her sister readjusts to public life. The two women are visual opposites of each other. The daintier Vira, with spaghetti-straight dirty-blonde hair, prefers dresses with matching heels. Savchenko has an androgynous look, with cropped hair, plain trousers, and flat shoes.

 

Prison took a toll on Savchenko. Her voice is guttural, tainted by the rasp of a chain smoker. Her boxy frame shrank due to hunger strikes and malnourishment. Now she weighs about 70 kilograms; while in Russian captivity, her weight dropped as low as 50.

 

Throughout our conversation, Savchenko clasped her hands, her blue eyes focused on mine. I asked her about politics, war, and her future. Having faced dozens of TV cameras since her release, she seemed prepared with an arsenal of ready-made answers. Corruption must be stamped out. The war must end. Ukraine must hold early parliamentary elections to "infuse fresh blood" into a government that has failed public expectations and which remains dominated by oligarchs and the old guard. "There can be peace [in Ukraine] only through war," she said. "Victory doesn't have to be categorical; it can be agreeable and merciful. But we cannot surrender without a fight."

 

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