Pilot verdict set to drive fresh wedge between Russia, Ukraine

Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko awaits the verdict in her controversial trial over the murder of two Russian journalists with few doubting she will be found guilty in a ruling that will fuel the feud between Kiev and Moscow.
A court in the southern Russian town of Donetsk is due to rule over two days on Monday and Tuesday after a six-month trial, with prosecutors demanding 23 years in jail for the 34-year-old combat helicopter navigator.
Ukraine and the West have decried the case as a political show trial and see Savchenko as the latest pawn in the Kremlin's broader aggression against its ex-Soviet neighbour that saw Moscow seize the Crimea peninsula and fuel a separatist insurgency.

They say Savchenko -- who has become a national hero at home and been elected to parliament in absentia -- was kidnapped by pro-Moscow separatists in east Ukraine in June 2014 and illegally smuggled over the border into Russia before being slapped with false charges.
But authorities in Russia insist Savchenko was involved in the fatal shelling of two Russian state journalists as she served in a volunteer pro-Kiev battalion fighting the insurgents and must face justice.
"Nobody has any illusions about what the verdict will be," Oleksandr Sushko, research director at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation in Kiev, told AFP.

"The only question is how the situation will develop after the sentencing."

Ukraine's pro-Western President Petro Poroshenko has pledged to do "everything possible" to bring Savchenko back home and mooted a prisoner swap to free her.
Kiev is holding two men it says were Russian soldiers serving in the east of the country that could provide Poroshenko with a possible bargaining chip.
But Moscow is also thought to have at least ten other Ukrainians behind bars -- including high-profile detainees like film director Oleg Sentsov -- and the Kremlin has given little hint it is ready to play ball.
Savchenko has struck a defiant figure throughout the long months of her detention -- which saw her sent to a psychiatric hospital near Moscow before being transferred close to the Ukraine border for her trial.

She has repeatedly gone on hunger strike to protest her conditions -- fasting for more than eighty days in one instance and going almost a week without food and water on another.
Usually dressed in a traditional Ukrainian blouse or pro-Kiev tshirt Savchenko has ridiculed the court from the glass defendant's cage and flashed her middle finger at the judges as the trial ended.