A Russian court on Tuesday sentenced Ukrainian military pilot Nadiya Savchenko to 22 years in prison over the killing of two journalists, in a ruling set to exacerbate Moscow's feud with Kiev and the West. Judge Leonid Stepanenko found the 34-year-old guilty of involvement in the fatal 2014 shelling of the Russian state television reporters in east Ukraine, a widely-expected verdict slammed by Washington.
Ukraine's pro-Western President Petro Poroshenko immediately pledged to "never recognise either this show trial or the so-called sentence", and offered to swap Savchenko for two suspected Russian soldiers currently on trial in Kiev. Crop-haired Savchenko - who has become a national hero in her homeland and elected to parliament in absentia - reacted as the judge read out the sentence at the end of the two-day ruling by shouting in Ukrainian and singing the Ukrainian national anthem.
Her defence team said she did not plan to appeal the "illegal" verdict. The helicopter pilot - who was fighting in a pro-Kiev militia group against rebels in east Ukraine - insists she was kidnapped by separatist fighters before the journalists were killed in June 2014 and then illegally smuggled to Russia.
Kiev and its Western allies see Savchenko as the latest pawn in Moscow's broader aggression against Ukraine, that has seen Moscow seize the Crimean peninsula and fuel the separatist uprising. US State Department spokesman John Kirby blasted Moscow's "blatant disregard for the principles of justice" after the verdict and reiterated Washington's calls for "Russia to immediately release Nadiya Savchenko". The guilty verdict over the deaths of journalists Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin had long been considered a foregone conclusion and Kiev has been pushing for a prisoner swap to free Savchenko. "Putin has said that after the so-called sentence, he will return Nadiya Savchenko to Ukraine," Poroshenko said in a statement.