MOSCOW (Reuters) -The president of Belarus has pardoned a Russian woman arrested two years ago when Minsk forced down a civilian airliner on what the West said was a false pretext to snatch her journalist boyfriend, the Belta news agency reported on Wednesday.
Sofia Sapega, 25, was arrested along with her then-boyfriend, exiled Belarus dissident journalist Roman Protasevich, when their Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was forced to land in Minsk in May 2021.
Sapega, born in Russia’s far east, was handed over to a delegation from Russia’s far eastern Primorsky region headed by Governor Oleg Kozhemyako, Belta said.
Sapega thanked Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko for the “gift” he had given her and her family in the form of a pardon, Belta reported.
Sapega had been sentenced to six years in prison for inciting social hatred in May 2022, the Vyasna rights group said.
“I really was very lucky,” Belta quoted Sapega as saying.
Her pardoning follows a similar move for Protasevich last month. He said he had been pardoned a few weeks after being jailed for eight years after being tried for an array of alleged crimes including conspiracy to seize power.
Protasevich, 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 Lukashenko, played an important role in broadcasting and coordinating huge opposition protests in 2020.
(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Alexander Marrow; editing by Andrew Osborn)
