Not surprisingly, this story has been making waves on social media. Here our Ukrainian Service's report:
'War Hero' Savchenko Accused Of Terror Plot, Levels Own Accusations In Ukraine
KYIV -- Lawmaker and former Russian captive Nadia Savchenko has traded incendiary accusations with senior Ukrainian authorities, and faces possible arrest over what Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko alleged was a detailed plan for a devastating "terrorist" attack on parliament.
Savchenko, a former military aviator who spent 22 months in Russian prisons after being detained by separatists in the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine, claimed on March 15 that parliament speaker Andriy Parubiy played a prominent role in a deadly crackdown on pro-European demonstrators during antigovernment Maidan protests that toppled Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014.
Speaking to journalists in front of the Security Service (SBU) headquarters in Kyiv, before she was questioned as a witness in a case against a man arrested last week on suspicion of plotting to kill President Petro Poroshenko and other officials in a series of armed attacks, Savchenko also asserted that Lutsenko covered up what she alleged was Parubiy's involvement in sniper shootings that authorities have said killed dozens of people during the crackdown on the Maidan protests.
Lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada swiftly responded by kicking Savchenko out of the single-chamber parliament's national security and defense committee. Lutsenko, meanwhile, told parliament that Savchenko -- who became a member of parliament on her return from Russia -- had planned an attack using grenades, mortars and automatic weapons.
Investigators have "irrefutable proof that Nadia Savchenko...personally planned, personally recruited, and personally gave instructions about how to commit a terrorist act here, in this chamber," Lutsenko said. He asked the Rada to strip her of her parliamentary immunity so that she could be arrested.
Lutsenko claimed that Savchenko's plan included destroying the Rada's roof cupola and killing surviving lawmakers with assault-rifle fire.
ALSO READ: The Many Faces Of Nadia Savchenko
Savchenko became a national hero and was greeted with fanfare when she returned to Ukraine in a prisoner swap with Russia in May 2016, but has faced mounting criticism since then. She has drawn fire for holding talks with the Russia-backed separatists without the government's consent.
In January 2017, lawmakers called for an investigation into what they said were anti-Ukrainian actions after Savchenko suggested that Kyiv would have to relax its claim on Crimea, which Russia seized after Yanukovych's ouster in 2014, in order to regain control of the territory held by the separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
More than 100 protesters were killed in the 2013-14 demonstrations, centered on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnost (Independence Square) that preceded Yanukovych's flight to Russia. Forty-eight of them were allegedly gunned down in February 2014 by snipers who Ukrainian authorities claim received direct orders from the Moscow-friendly Yanukovych.
In her remarks on March 15, Savchenko said that she saw Parubiy, who was on the antigovernment side at the time, "leading snipers into the Hotel Ukraine," which looms over the Maidan. "I saw a blue minibus and armed people coming out of it, I have said earlier [to investigators] who those people were. Those people are now lawmakers."
She said the deaths on the Maidan will never be thoroughly investigated, asserting that the government that came to power after Yanukovych's downfall does not want it to happen.
Savchenko also accused the government of "giving up Crimea" and said it bore responsibility for the deaths of Ukrainian soldiers in the ongoing conflict in the east, where more than 10,300 combatants and civilians have been killed in the war between Kyiv's forces and the separatists since April 2014.
It was not immediately clear whether Lutsenko's accusation against Savchenko was directly related to the case in which she was summoned for questioning as a witness. The suspect in that case is is Volodymyr Ruban, who has been a key negotiator in prisoner exchanges with the Russia-backed separatists.
Volodymyr Ruban
Ruban was arrested last week and charged with plotting to kill Poroshenko and other top officials, after he was detained while crossing into government-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine -- allegedly with large amounts of weapons and ammunition hidden in a shipment of furniture.
Investigators claim Ruban planned to use mortars, grenade launchers, guns, and explosives to carry out armed attacks on the residences of statesmen and political leaders" including Poroshenko, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and National Security and Defense Council chief Oleksandr Turchynov with the intention of killing them.
Ruban, whose Center for the Release of POWs has been involved in prisoner exchanges between Kyiv and Russia-backed separatists since 2014, maintains his innocence and says he was framed.
In the past, Ruban was involved in the activities of Ukrainian Choice, an organization that many in Ukraine consider to be pro-Kremlin. The group is headed by Viktor Medvedchuk, who has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and has played a major behind-the-scenes role in exchanges of captives.
Savchenko has been involved in prisoner exchanges in the past.
With reporting by Reuters
Now that she's been making headlines again, it's probably a good time to re-up RFE/RL correspondent Christopher Miller's profile of Nadia Savchenko, which he wrote shortly after she had been released from Russian captivity in 2016.
The Many Faces Of Nadia Savchenko
Now Home Free, Is Ukraine's Hero Up For Another Fight?
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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A tweet from Ukraine's deputy prime minister of Ukraine for European and Euro-Atlantic integration