INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
A Belarusian court has sentenced student Sofia Sapega, the Russian girlfriend of a Belarusian dissident journalist, to six years in prison
flight from Athens to Vilnius in May 2021 when Belarusian authorities forcibly diverted the plane, citing a bomb threat
The couple were detained upon disembarking in Minsk, a move that sparked global outcry and new Western sanctions on Minsk.Grodno Regional
Court found Sapega, 24, guilty on charges of inciting social enmity and discord as well as illegally collecting and disseminating
information about the private life of an unnamed person, Viasna said.In a video leaked to a pro-Belarusian government social media account
last May, Sapega admitted to running a Telegram channel called The Black Book of Belarus, which published the personal data of Belarusian
made under duress.The court also ordered Sapega to pay a fine of 175,000 Belarusian rubles ($50,000).She is not planning to appeal her
sentence, her lawyer told the BBC, as she intends to seek a pardon from President Alexander Lukashenko.Should Sapega be pardoned, she will
under pretrial house arrest in Belarus since June 2021.In May 2021, Russia's presidential human rights council asked Foreign Minister Sergei
Lavrov to work toward securing Sapega's release
In December of that year, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Sapega's case was on the ministry's agenda, "like all cases of
Russian citizens arrested abroad."Protasevich, 27, is the former editor of Nexta, a Telegram channel that played a key role in mobilizing
the anti-Lukashenko protests of summer 2020 following the authoritarian leader's widely disputed election victory.He is yet to go on
that over 1,000 people are political prisoners in Belarus.
