Russia's strong man politics has real victims, Nadiya Savchenko is one of them. She is a Ukraine pilot.

Russia’s mainstream media (click here) and President Vladimir Putin continue to remain silent about numerous prisoners of Putin’s undeclared war against Ukraine. Pilot Nadiya Savchenko and 30 other Ukrainian service members are still being illegally held in Russian jails. Taking hostages is one of Russia’s Hamas-style tactics against its perceived enemies – foreign and domestic. In that sense, Nadiya is much more than a prisoner. To Putin and his regime, she is the symbol of Ukraine itself: spirited, strong and unbroken. In a video of her interrogation, Nadiya said that she does not expect to return home alive, but is not afraid. The brave pilot has entered the third week of her hunger strike, during relative media silence. In the meantime, Savchenko’s attorneys are fighting an uphill battle, seeking justice in kangaroo courts of Russia’s Banana Republic....

Ukraine should be touting the fact it's prisons are just as strong as Russian prisons.

May 25, 2016
By Andrew E Kramer

Moscow — Russia and UkraineMoscow - Russia and Ukaine (click here)e) swapped high-profile prisoners on Wednesday, a move that could help ease negotiations over a settlement in the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian news media reported that a Ukrainian helicopter pilot, Lt. Nadiya V. Savchenko, was released from jail and was flown to the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. She was swapped for two Russians captured in eastern Ukraine — who the Ukrainians say are soldiers in Russia’s military intelligence service — and flown to Kiev in the plane of Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko, who announced her arrival in the country.

The trade touches on pivotal questions surrounding the unrest. Over the course of the two-year conflict in Ukraine, the bloodiest in Europe since the Balkan fighting a decade ago, Russia has denied sending soldiers or weapons across the border. Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine in unmarked uniforms were said to have gone there on their vacations....