MOSCOW, December 22. /TASS/. A Russian lawmaker said on Monday statements by Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Ukraine’s Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) party that the life of Ukrainian woman 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, is aimed at attracting attention from the United States and the European Union.

“Ms. Tymoshenko again is seeking to disseminate lies about Russia by inventing alleged threats,” Irina Yarovaya, the chairperson of the anti-corruption and security committee of the Russian parliament's lower house, told journalists. “The situation invented and circulated in the mass media by the Batkivshchyna leader is just her attempt to attract the United States’ and the European Union’s attention to her forgotten political figure.”

Yarovaya said that Tymoshenko’s pronouncements were “astonishing cynicism in a situation when people in Donbas are facing not just a hypothetical but a real deadly threat, including women, the elderly and children.”

“Savchenko is being kept in conditions that meet corresponding sanitary norms, with proper meals and in safety, unlike people in Donbas, who have lost their homes and elementary amenities because of such people like Tymoshenko and Savchenko,” she stressed.

Yarovaya reaffirmed that Savchenko’s case was being investigated “in strict compliance with the norms of international and Russian laws.”

Earlier on Monday, a Moscow court upheld the ruling to extend Savchenko’s arrest till February 13, 2015.

Russia's criminal case against Ukrainian female pilot

Savchenko, a citizen of Ukraine, is accused of complicity in the murder of two Russian journalists near Luhansk last July. She is now 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 party. Her name topped the party’s electoral list.

On December 18, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at his annual news conference that Savchenko would be immediately set free if it turned out that she is innocent, but would be punished if her guilt was proven.