The trial of Savchenko was postponed

On the morning of July 30, the Ukrainian military personnel Nadezhda Savchenko was delivered to the Donetsk city court of the Rostov region, where a closed meeting was to be held. During the meeting, the parties intended to submit their petitions, and the court to appoint the date and place of consideration of the case “on the merits”.

However, there was an unexpected one. The court suddenly decided to postpone the meeting before considering the complaints of lawyers to the defendant requiring the transfer of the process to Moscow. “The Donetsk City Court granted the defense of the defense to determine the jurisdiction to the Rostov Regional Court,” said one of the lawyers of Nadezhda Savchenko Nikolai Polozov. The defense believes that the territorial proximity with Donbass poses into question the safety of the participants in the process.

Nadezhda Savchenko has been under arrest in Russia since July 2014. The investigation accuses her of aiding of the murder of two Russian journalists who died in the Luhansk region - Igor Korneluk and Anton Voloshin. At the same time, according to investigators, Savchenko illegally arrived in Russia, where she was arrested. The defense claims that the woman was captured in battle with separatists and then transferred to the Russian authorities.

The situation for Hedgehog is commented by the lawyer of Nadezhda Savchenko Mark Feigin :

Nadezhda Savchenko is accused of three crimes. The first is the illegal crossing of the border, Article 322, part 1 of the Criminal Code. The second is complicity in the murder, Article 105 of the Criminal Code. And the third is an attempt on the murder of two or more persons, because allegedly at the time of shelling next to journalists there was a group of civilians who did not die, since the fragments did not get into them. But since Savchenko, according to the investigation, corrected the fire, the composition “attempt on the murder of 2 or more persons” appears, also the 105th article.

Two of three crimes, namely, complicity and attempt, occurred outside the Russian Federation. And one, illegal crossing of the border, took place next to Donetsk in the Rostov region. Not in Voronezh, as they stated initially, namely in Donetsk, on an uncontrolled section of the border. And since one crime occurred in Donetsk, the Prosecutor General’s office decided that the whole thing should be considered in Donetsk.

But, firstly, the place of the crime is an insufficient foundation, there are also considerations of a procedural nature. And the law gives us the right to insist in another place. Secondly, lawyers in this case from Moscow, and Savchenko sat in Moscow, and all the main witnesses, and the parents of the dead journalists are in Moscow. To get to Donetsk, they first need to get to Rostov, and then go another 150 kilometers. And all expenses associated with this can also be assigned to Savchenko. In general, it is not clear why on earth to send it to Donetsk, if most of the ships on our complaints have already occurred in Moscow.

In addition, Moscow has much fewer threats to security: if you look at the map, it is clear that Donetsk in the Rostov region is now actually an enclave inside the LPR. I can’t complain: the security was ensured in our current visit - a huge number of police officers, riot police, snipers. We do not say that there were problems with safety, but why to start all this, specially take consuls there, if you can consider the case in Moscow.

So far, there is no place for a place. At the moment, the Donetsk court has only satisfied the application for the protection of the process. In the morning, a complaint was filed in the Rostov Regional Court of the election of jurisdiction in the case of Savchenko in the Donetsk city court. Now we are talking only about the suspension of the process, since the side of protection insists on the cancellation of the decision of the General Prosecutor's Office, which determined the place of the court. It has not yet been possible to proceed to any issues “essentially”, because the law prescribes that the issue of jurisdiction be fundamentally resolved before the transition to everyone else. Therefore, the petition that we filed, from the point of view of law, could not be satisfied, and even the prosecutor supported the defense, citing the law.

The overall impression is that in Donetsk they do not really want to do this matter, although this is my purely personal opinion. It is unlikely that this process is perceived as a “prize”, no one has a great desire to deal with anyone on the periphery. Because with all the obvious fabrication of the case, to take responsibility for making a decision on such a basis, I do not want to deal with the consequences of the IC. Such motivation may take place.

On the other hand, in provincial vessels, they often adhere to the purely formal side of the issue and as a result are solved in accordance with the law and by law. So it was my colleague Nikolai Polozov in the case of the son of Mustafa Gemilya Haiser: he was accused, the jury was considered the case, and a fair amount of decisions was more like legal than to arbitrary, as often happens in Moscow ships.

However, I would not be very optimistic in connection with the consideration of our complaint regarding jurisdiction by the regional court. In general, there is no reason to believe that this will change the situation. The team still acts for propaganda purposes to blame Savchenko of complicity of killing journalists and illegally crossing the border and making a dramatic performance out of this. Let's see what will happen in court in Rostov, but there are no particular grounds for optimism yet.