Pro-West House begins in Ukraine

All 423 elected deputies were sworn in during an emotional inauguration ceremony inside the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s parliament that was presided over by speaker Oleksandr Turchynov.

Even Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who remains imprisoned in Russia on what Kiev says are bogus murder chargers, took her oath.

She reportedly signed it from her prison cell before her lawyer brought it to Ukraine. Savchenko was elected to parliament on the ticket of ex-PM Yulia Tymoshenko’s Batkivshchyna party.

But hers and 27 other seats remain vacant in the 450-seat Verkhovna Rada. Due to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March and the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, where Moscow-backed separatists occupy large swaths of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, it was impossible to hold votes in several districts. Those areas under separatist-control, for now, will have no elected representatives. The ceremony included all the pomp and circumstance of previous convocations.

A choir dressed in traditional Ukrainian garb sang the national anthem, followed by the reading of a traditional prayer that began with the words, “God the great and united one, protect our Ukraine.”