AT THREE o’clock in the morning on May 25th, guards roused Nadia Savchenko in her prison cell in southern Russia, told her to pack her things and whisked her to an airport. “I didn’t know if I was flying to Ukraine or to Siberia,” says the Ukrainian military pilot, who spent nearly two years in Russian captivity on fabricated charges. Only when she saw yellow and blue stripes on the plane did she realise that she was heading home.

Ms Savchenko descended on Ukraine a ready-made heroine. She tops polls as the most trusted politician in the country, far above the president, Petro Poroshenko. Supporters have created “Savchenko for President” Facebook groups, and she has not demurred: “If you want me to be your president,” she said at her first press conference, “I will become the president.” Russian commentators have gleefully predicted she might bring down Mr Poroshenko and his government. Yet the 35-year-old Ms Savchenko is neither saviour nor saboteur; she is a soldier in an unexpected position.

Revolutions often thrust people into unforeseen roles, but few are forced to make leaps as audacious as Ms Savchenko’s. Born in Kiev, she initially studied design (she passed the time in prison with origami). But childhood dreams of flying led her to the army. She served as a paratrooper with Ukrainian peacekeepers in Iraq, and later became the first female pilot in Ukraine’s air force. When protests broke out in Kiev in late 2013, Ms Savchenko began going there on weekends from her base in western Ukraine. What drew her to the Maidan were not calls for European integration but anger that the then president, Viktor Yanukovych, had sent riot police to attack his own people.

After Mr Yanukovych fled and fighting erupted in eastern Ukraine, Ms Savchenko decided, like many at the time, to make for the front line on her own. She joined up with the Aidar Battalion, a volunteer force that would later become notorious for human-rights abuses. In June 2014 she was taken prisoner during a botched mission, smuggled into Russia and arrested for allegedly directing artillery fire that killed two Russian television journalists.

Her defiance of her captors made her a cause célèbre. In the autumn of 2014 political parties recruited her to join Ukraine’s parliament. Ms Savchenko did not take the offers seriously (“I never expected to return alive”), but agreed to join the party of a former prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, out of “female solidarity”. After she was elected, her trial became a diplomatic flashpoint, and her eventual release was the product of high-level international negotiations. (In return for Ms Savchenko, Ukraine freed two Russian soldiers captured in eastern Ukraine last year.)

During her first weeks back, she has displayed an independent streak and a tireless work ethic. She admits that she knows little about economics or world affairs: “I’ve never been to Europe; I’ve only been abroad at war in Iraq, and in prison in Russia.” She says she gets along best with a group of young reformist MPs who call themselves the “EuroOptimists”. Yet she also took a trip back to the front, donning a flak jacket alongside Dmytro Yarosh, a far-right nationalist leader. (Ms Savchenko’s views on what makes someone a Ukrainian—“it’s in the genetic code of a people”—sound highly nationalistic.)

If anything, the hopes pinned on Ms Savchenko point not so much to her promise but to Ukraine’s dearth of leaders. Aware of how risky politics can be, she seems keen not to miss her chance. She has told parliament she will not let them forget those “who died for Ukraine on Maidan” and in Donbass, and suggested negotiating directly with the leaders of the separatist republics to free prisoners—a position that would be anathema for most Ukrainian politicians. She has come out against the Minsk peace agreements in their current form, putting her at odds with Mr Poroshenko. Yet she says it is too early for her to chide the president: “In order to criticise someone, you have to do something yourself first.”