A Ukrainian pilot in Russian custody has been found guilty of murder, according to Russian state-run media. She says her detention is politically motivated.
Nadezhda Savchenko was arrested in 2014, charged in the deaths of two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine and illegally crossing into Russia.
Savchenko has said she did not kill anyone, maintaining she was kidnapped in Ukraine and brought across the border into Russia before being charged.
Russian news agencies reported that she will be sentenced Tuesday.
Savchenko has gone on hunger strikes during her captivity — including one that lasted 83 days — to protest her detention.
In a letter from prison written in response to questions from CNN last year, she said she had already been in captivity for an hour when the Russian journalists were killed.
“The ‘rebels’ themselves told me that those journalists came under fire of their own ‘makhnovtsi’ (slang for ‘anarchists’),” she said.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko awarded Savchenko the title Hero of Ukraine, one of the nation’s highest honors. She was also voted into the Ukrainian parliament in absentia.
