The Prosecutor General's Office of Belarus granted Sofya Sapega's request to transfer her to Russia to serve her sentence. As RIA Novosti was told in the department, the girl will be handed over to the Russian authorities immediately after they receive a guarantee from them that the sentence handed down to the Russian woman will be executed.
In early April, Sapieha's lawyer announced that the procedure for transferring his client to Russia had been launched, but did not give a specific time frame for this to happen. Earlier in March, she was denied a pardon, and also included in the Belarusian list of persons involved in terrorism.
Sapega was detained in May 2021, along with her then boyfriend, ex-Nexta editor-in-chief Roman Protasevich: for the sake of their detention, the plane on which they flew to Lithuania from Greece was forced to make an emergency landing in Minsk. A year later, a Belarusian court sentenced the Russian woman to six years in prison on charges of illegally collecting and distributing “information about private life constituting a personal and family secret of another person, without his consent, which caused harm to the rights, freedoms and legitimate interests of the victim.” According to the prosecution, Sapieha was involved in the administration of the Black Book of Belarus, a Telegram channel that published the personal data of security officials involved in bullying protesters.
