A Belarusian court has sentenced Sofia Sapega, the girlfriend of a dissident detained after their Ryanair flight was forced to land in Belarus, to six years in prison for inciting social hatred, the Vyasna rights group said.
The 24-year-old Russian citizen was flying with her boyfriend Roman Protasevich, a dissident blogger critical of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, on a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius on 23 May 2021 when it was diverted to Minsk by Belarusian authorities.
At the time Belarus ordered the plane to land after an anonymous tip-off that there was a bomb onboard, which later turned out to be false, but Mr Protasevich and Ms Sapega were immediately detained.
News of the flight diversion prompted international outrage and led the European Union and United States to impose more sanctions on Belarus.
Russian opposition figures criticised their country for not intervening in the case despite claims it is protecting Russians abroad, one of the reasons Moscow has used to justify its military campaign in Ukraine.
"I am sorry for Sofia and her family. No one should suffer from dictatorship," exiled Belarus opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya wrote on Twitter after the verdict.
"The Russian foreign ministry did not take any steps to get her out of the clutches of Lukashenko," allies of jailed opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov wrote on his Twitter account.
"Six years for being in love (with Protasevich)," Gennady Gudkov, a former MP and member of the liberal opposition, wrote on Twitter.
The Russian General Consulate in the Belarusian city of Brest said one its diplomats attended the court hearing, but made no further comment, and there was no immediate reaction to the verdict from Russian authorities.
The status of the investigation against Mr Protasevich remains unclear.
The blogger, who fled Belarus in 2019, had worked as an editor at the Poland-based Nexta Live channel on the Telegram messenger app.
The channel, which is openly hostile to Mr Lukashenko, played an important role in broadcasting and coordinating opposition protests in 2020, sparked by anger over what the opposition said was a "rigged" presidential election that gave the president his sixth term in power.
Mr Lukashenko denied stealing the election and cracked down hard on the opposition, whose leading members were jailed or forced to flee abroad.
