A court in Belarus has jailed former presidential contender Viktor Babariko for 14 years after convicting him on corruption charges he denied.
The 57-year-old was accused of receiving bribes and "laundering funds obtained by criminal means" when he was head of Belgazprombank, the Belarusian branch of a bank belonging to Russian energy giant Gazprom.
Prosecutors had requested a 15-year sentence, the maximum possible punishment.
He was also fined the equivalent of about €45,000 and barred from holding senior official positions.
Seven other defendants in the case, including several Belgazprombank executives, were prosecuted on the charges.
They all pleaded guilty and were sentenced to terms of between three and six years.
Before his arrest last June, opinion polls suggested Viktor Babariko was leader Alexander Lukashenko's main rival ahead of a presidential election last August which the opposition says was rigged to prolong Mr Lukashenko's long rule.
In power since 1994, Mr Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory and a new term as president, sparking the biggest protests in the modern history of the Moscow-backed ex-Soviet republic of 9.7 million.
He denied electoral fraud.
Ahead of today's ruling, allies of Mr Babariko said the charges against him had been fabricated to thwart his political ambitions.
"It's an insane term for a man who decided to go into politics and became one of the leaders who woke the country froma long sleep," said Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a protest leader who fled Belarus amid a post-election crackdown.
"The regime is doing everything to kill off any thought that even remotely resembles faith and hope. But for Viktor - as for thousands of innocent people in prison - what matters most is the hope in our hearts," she said.
The US embassy in Minsk criticised the ruling.
"The cruel sham of the Belarus court system is on display today ... showing the Lukashenka regime will stop at nothing to keep power," the embassy said on Twitter.
After Mr Babariko was barred from running and detained, Maria Kolesnikova, one of his allies, joined forces with two other women - Ms Tsikhanouskaya and Veronika Tsepkalo - to lead the opposition campaign.
Ms Kolesnikova is now in jail, Ms Tsepkalo has fled abroad, and Ms Tsikhanouskaya, who ran against Mr Lukashenko and has since emerged as the opposition's most prominent figure at liberty, is trying to undermine him from neighbouring Lithuania.
Tens of thousands took to the streets of Belarus for weeks to protest the election result but were met with a harsh police crackdown.
Authorities have also clamped down on independent media, jailing journalists over their coverage of the protests and withdrawing accreditation from foreign outlets.
Western powers have responded with a wave of sanctions against Lukashenko's regime, especially after a Ryanair passenger flight between European capitals was grounded in late May in Minsk and authorities detained opposition activist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend who were on board.
United Nations Special Rapporteur Anaïs Marin told Belarus yesterday to immediately free some 530 jailed people whom rights groups consider "political prisoners" as Washington's envoy hinted at the possibility of further economic sanctions against Minsk.
Ms Marin said more than 35,000 people had been arbitrarily detained over the past year and that the fear of repression has caused tens of thousands of Belarusians to flee to seek refuge abroad.
