MOSCOW, December 15. /TASS/. Ukrainian female pilot Nadezhda Savchenko, who is kept in custody in Moscow on charges of being involved in the murder of two Russian journalists near Ukraine’s eastern city of Luhansk in July 2014, said on Monday she was embarking on a hunger strike, her lawyer Mark Feigin told TASS.

“Today, she told the Moscow City Court in the videoconference regime that she was launching a hunger strike as the administration of the Pechatniki detention wards, where she is being kept, refuses to let a private doctor to examine her and medical examinations are done by the prison doctor,” the lawyer said, adding that he knew no more details of the hunger strike.

Savchenko, a citizen of Ukraine, is accused of complicity in the murder of two Russian journalists near Luhansk last July. She was detained on the territory of Russia and was taken into custody in the city of Voronezh this summer. She is now staying in Moscow where she was brought for a psychiatric examination.

According to investigators, during hostilities near eastern Ukraine’s Luhansk in June this year, Savchenko, a Mi-24 helicopter flight navigator, joined Ukraine’s volunteer Aidar battalion. She spotted the location of a group of Russian journalists from the VGTRK television channel and other civilians near Luhansk and transmitted the coordinates to a mortar battery. The mortar shell fired at the target killed two members of the Russian camera crew — Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin.

Savchenko won a seat at Verkhovna Rada in the October 26 parliamentary elections in Ukraine with former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko's Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party. Her name topped the party’s electoral list.

Meanwhile, a source close to the investigation told TASS that Savchenko’s winning seat in the Ukrainian legislature had no relation to her procedural status, since the Russian legislation grants immunity only to Russian lawmakers.