Now Prohibited in Ukraine’s Parliamentary Chamber: Weapons

The Ukrainian parliament on Thursday began enforcing a new law requiring lawmakers to check guns, explosives and other weapons at the door before entering the legislative chamber, after a member arrived this month with a pistol and three hand grenades.

No law had prohibited the lawmaker, Nadiya V. Savchenko, from entering with the weapons, it turned out, but the episode unnerved her colleagues, spurred a prosecutorial inquiry over her intentions, and led to the adoption this week of the weapons prohibition.

In the country’s raucous domestic politics, brawls are common in parliament, and apparently enough lawmakers also carry weapons that the new law immediately became contentious.

On Thursday, two members of parliament declined to walk through a metal detector, saying the law was being enforced in a partisan fashion, with members of some parties subjected to more stringent checks.

Gun ownership is legal in Ukraine but only for hunting and self-defense, and civilian ownership of hand grenades is illegal, though the country is now awash in weapons smuggled from the war against Russian-backed separatists in two eastern provinces.

Some veterans, including Savchenko, who was captured in 2014 and tried in Russia before being freed in a prisoner exchange, have become fierce critics of the government, which they accuse of corruption and other shortcomings. The risk from disgruntled, possibly armed veterans was already evident this year after 100 or so former members of the military and their supporters set up a protest camp outside arliament.

Savchenko was not immediately prosecuted when she was found to be carrying the grenades on March 15 because her status as a lawmaker granted her immunity.

Parliament passed the law against bearing weapons in the chamber Tuesday, after the prosecutor general, Yuri V. Lutsenko, accused Savchenko of plotting a coup that would include an attack on parliament. On Thursday, after passing through metal detectors previously used only for staff members and visitors, lawmakers voted also to strip Savchenko of her immunity.

Savchenko, who denied that she planning a coup, was arrested. In a speech before she was detained, she lashed out at her accusers. Ukraine, she said, was making “antiheroes” out of the heroes of its revolution.

Along with highlighting the wobbly state of Ukrainian politics, the arrest came as a sharp reversal for Savchenko, who was elected to parliament while in a Russian prison, before she was exchanged in 2016 for two Russian soldiers detained in Ukraine.

“I proved that I was a hero of Ukraine in Moscow’s prisons, facing the external enemy,” Savchenko said. “And I will now show you, the internal enemies of Ukraine, that I am still a hero.”

Savchenko has said that she needed the weapons for self-defense, and that the police officials who secretly recorded a conversation in which she discussed an attack on parliament had misconstrued her words.

The new law prohibits members of parliament from entering the chamber with “explosive materials, ammunition of all types, training or imitation ammunition, flammable liquids or solid substances or fireworks.”