The tough 34-year-old Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko is a high profile prisoner in a forgotten war. She left school at 16 to train as a paratrooper, served in Iraq, persuaded her country’s macho top brass to let her become the first female cadet in Kharkiv air academy, qualified to fly helicopters and the Sukhoi Su-24 bomber. When the Russians stoked up a separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine she had herself transferred to the frontline and, according to Moscow, ordered the firing of mortar shells on a rebel position, an attack that killed two Russian journalists.

Savchenko was captured in the summer of 2014, interrogated while chained to a radiator — a smuggled video shows her shouting at her captors: “Your Russian authorities just want to