Ukrainian Pilot Nadiya Savchenko Denies Death Reports, Appears in Video from Frontline

Nadiya Savchenko, a former Verkhovna Rada deputy who was pardoned by Russian President Vladimir Putin for a prisoner exchange, recorded a video from the frontlines and denied reports of her death. The video was published on the Strana.ua Telegram channel.

"Just against the backdrop of the blooming Ukrainian white hazel tree, I want to tell everyone: I'm alive," the woman says in the video.

Savchenko is currently commanding a company of the 131st Battalion of the 112th Territorial Defense Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Earlier, Russian military correspondents reported that Savchenko was allegedly killed in a Russian air raid that targeted the headquarters of Ukraine's 112th Brigade.

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Nadiya Viktorivna Savchenko (born 11 May 1981) is a Ukrainian politician, former Army aviation pilot in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and former People's Deputy of Ukraine. During the 2014 War in Donbas, Savchenko was a first lieutenant in the Ukrainian Ground Forces and served as instructor with a volunteer infantry unit, the Aidar Battalion. In June 2014, she was captured by pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine and handed over to Russia where she was accused of having directed artillery fire that killed two Russian state-television journalists in Ukraine. She was subsequently charged and convicted of murder and illegally crossing the Russian state border, despite being abducted from Ukrainian territory one hour before the deaths of the journalists. One of her lawyers, Mark Feygin, said she was a prisoner-of-war and called on the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations to demand her immediate release as well as the release of other Ukrainian POWs lest Russia be held in violation of the Geneva Conventions. European Union ministers and their representative regarded her detention as illegal and that her trial did not respect basic human rights, including the right to fair proceedings.