MOSCOW, September 24. /ITAR-TASS/. Ukrainian female pilot Nadezhda Savchenko charged with involvement in killing of Russian reporters on the outskirts of the city of Luhansk in Ukraine’s embattled east will undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Moscow, a spokesman for the Russian Investigative Committee said on Wednesday.

When asked by ITAR-TASS, Vladimir Markin replied that “Nadezhda Savchenko accused of murder on article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code is to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.”

“It is a routine practice and obligation that the Russian criminal law demands in cases when an individual is charged with especially grave crimes,” Markin said adding that Savchenko and her lawyer were notified about the psychiatric examination that would be carried out in a hospital in Moscow.

Earlier, Savchenko’s lawyer Mark Feigin said that his defendant had been convoyed from a pre-trial detention center in the Russian central city of Voronezh somewhere, probably to Moscow. The defence connects this with the investigators’ plans to conduct Savchenko’s psychological and psychiatric evaluation in hospital. The lawyers said they did not know her whereabouts.

Feigin said that on September 26 Moscow’s Basmanny district court will hold a hearing into complaint against the decision to place Savchenko in hospital for mental tests.

Charges against Savchenko

The Russian Investigative Committee charged the Ukrainian national Nadezhda Savchenko with involvement in murder of two reporters, who worked for the Russian VGTRK TV corporation, in Ukraine. She was detained in Russia and then arrested.

The investigators say that in June during combat operations near the city of Luhansk Savchenko joined the Aidar battalion as a helicopter door gunner. Locating the positions of the Russian TV crew and other civilians near Luhansk, she passed them on to the military that opened mortar fire on that group of people killing the Russian reporters, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin.