Sofia Sapega, a Russian citizen who is serving a six-year prison term in Belarus after being arrested along with her then boyfriend Raman Pratasevich after their commercial flight was forced to land in Minsk last year, has asked Belarusian authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka for clemency.
Sapega's lawyer, Anton Hashynski, told the BBC on June 27 that his client officially filed her clemency request last week. Relatives had said that Sapega asked Lukashenka for clemency in December as well, though there was no further information given on that request.
Sapega and Pratasevich, a dissident blogger, were detained after their commercial flight from Athens to Vilnius was forced to land in Minsk in May 2021.
They were immediately detained upon leaving the aircraft and Sapega was accused of administering a channel on the Telegram messenger app that published the personal data of Belarusian security forces. She was sentenced on May 6, and three days later, Pratasevich announced that he had married another woman.
Belarus said it had ordered the plane to land after an anonymous bomb threat. Evidence later revealed that Belarusian officials conspired to fake the bomb threat as a pretense for diverting the plane so they could detain the two.
Pratasevich, who fled Belarus in 2019, worked as an editor at the Poland-based Nexta Live channel on Telegram. He has yet to go on trial and the status of the investigation against him is unclear.
He faces charges in connection with civil disturbances that followed a disputed presidential election in August 2020, an offense punishable by up to 15 years in prison. He was a key administrator of the Telegram channel Nexta-Live, which covered mass protests denouncing the official results of the election, which the opposition said was rigged.
Pratasevich, who was transferred to house arrest after his initial detention, made several appearances on Belarusian state television last year, which prompted the opposition and Western officials to accuse Lukashenka's regime of extracting video confessions under torture and called for his and Sapega's immediate release.
In January, Pratasevich said in a televised interview that he was not under house arrest, though again it was not clear if he made the statement freely.
Lukashenka has denied stealing the election and has since cracked down hard on the opposition, whose leading members have been jailed or forced to flee the country fearing for their safety.
