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Ukrainian doctors allowed to visit Savchenko in pre-trial detention centre

MOSCOW, March 14. /TASS/. Ukrainian doctors were allowed to a pre-trial detention centre to visit former Ukrainian military Nadezhda Savchenko.

"Ukrainian doctors have come in to see her," the woman’s lawyer Mark Feigin said.

The doctors are high-level specialists: a gastroenterologist - nutritionist, a neurologist and anaesthetist.

On Friday, the defence lodged a complaint to the Russian General Prosecutor’s Office after the Ukrainian doctors were not allowed to examine Savchenko on grounds that they had no authorisation document, the lawyer said.

The 33-year-old Ukrainian military flyer has been charged with involvement in an attack that killed two Russian journalists on eastern Ukraine's frontlines, where she enlisted as a volunteer in one of the battalions fighting against local militias.

Russian investigators say that Savchenko, the gunner of a Mi-24 helicopter, joined the notorious Aidar battalion during combat operations in the much-troubled Lugansk region of Ukraine last June.

Noting the position of a filming crew of the Russian State Broadcasting Company and other civilians, she allegedly reported the data to mortar-equipped personnel who fired on the crew and the civilians. As a result, correspondent Igor Kornelyuk and sound engineer Anton Voloshin were killed.

Savchenko went on hunger strike in December to protest at her arrest. Her lawyers said in mid-February that she was also refusing glucose, taking only drinking water. On March 6, the Ukrainian agreed to drink chicken broth following doctors’ recommendations. But the prison service said she had not given up continuing her hunger strike.

As she was elected a deputy of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (parliament) of the eighth convocation, she filed resignation from the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Ella Pamfilova and other human rights advocates - members of the presidential Human Rights Council - have repeatedly visited her in the pre-trial detention centre.