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Sofja Sapega: The picture of the Russian comes from her Instagram account
Photo: instagram.com / sapega_sofia_ / IMAGO
What would they have given to hear their daughter's voice, says Sergei Duditsch.
Once only.
But for half a year, the parents were not even allowed to call Sofja Sapega.
The security authorities forbade it.
Sapega, 24, has been in the hands of the Belarusian regime for more than ten months.
On May 23 last year, dictator Alexander Lukashenko had the Ryanair plane, in which Sapega and her friend, the well-known Belarusian activist Roman Protasevich, were sitting, forced to land.
Both were arrested afterwards.
Unlike Protasevich, Sapega is a Russian citizen, but that didn't stop Lukashenko from having her locked up and largely isolated from the outside world.
Sapega asked the ruler in a letter for pardon, but he refused her.
The young Russian woman will be tried in a court in Grodno from Monday.
Officially, the Belarusian regime has accused Sapega of running an opposition Telegram channel.
To this day, he publishes personal data of members of the Belarusian security apparatus.
The information provided by the authorities cannot be checked.
They say they allegedly found information on Sapega's mobile phone and computer proving their activities for the Telegram channel.
The regime also refers to a statement by Sapega.
Shortly after her arrest, she was presented in a video in the manner of a hostage-taker.
In it, she said she was allegedly responsible for the Telegram channel.
How much pressure she was put under for this shot can only be guessed at: she hardly looks into the camera, rattling off her personal information.
Now the young woman has been charged with seven criminal offenses, the most serious of which includes "deliberate acts aimed at creating social unrest".
This refers to threats or other attacks that state officials received after publishing their data on the Telegram channel.
Up to twelve years imprisonment in Belarus.
Sapega has signed an agreement with the security authorities and is committed to cooperation, her lawyer Anton Gaschinsky tells SPIEGEL.
"The step was not easy for her, but she is afraid of being imprisoned for twelve years." In the case of cooperation, the sentence in Belarus is usually halved.
It's not just her lawyers who assume that Sapega will be convicted.
Court proceedings in Belarus are in most cases considered to be sham trials – especially when it comes to political proceedings.
hope for pardon
Sapega was arrested in May, in particular to put pressure on Protasevich.
Because of his work on the Nexta telegam channel, he was considered one of the main enemies of the regime.
»Nexta« acted as a driving force behind the major protests in Belarus after the 2020 rigged presidential election.
The KGB secret service listed the employees of the Telegram channel as “extremists”.
Gashinsky, who represents Sapega's family from Russia and works with her lawyers in Belarus, now expects a lengthy process.
21 days of the trial have already been scheduled, he says.
After the trial, Sapega hopes for a pardon from Lukashenko.
The lawyers wanted to try again to obtain this, says Gaschinsky.
Should this not succeed, the lawyers want to bring the young woman to Russia, her country of birth, where she could serve out her sentence.
"It would be lower here because the laws provide for other penalties," says Gaschinsky.
Sapega had received several visits from Russian diplomats in the past year.
Her case is said to have been a topic in talks between Lukashenko and ruler Vladimir Putin.
So far, however, public support for the citizen Sapega has been rather muted in Russia.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov spoke up shortly after the Russian woman was arrested, but after that it became quiet.
Sapega hails from Vladivostok in Far East Russia.
She moved to Belarus at the age of eight with her mother, a Russian, who married the Belarusian Duditsch there.
Sapega kept her Russian passport.
Before her arrest, the young woman had studied law in Vilnius.
In Lithuania she met her boyfriend, the Belarusian activist Protasevich.
According to her family, Sapega was not politically active.
»She currently feels like a bird in a golden cage«
Unlike his girlfriend, Protasevich appeared several times on Belarusian state television, interviews and press conferences after the arrest.
How voluntarily this happened is unclear.
It was "psychologically very difficult" for Sapega, says her lawyer Gaschinsky.
She never thought she could get into a situation like this.
'She feels like a bird in a golden cage these days.
There is a certain freedom, but it is very limited.«
After a few weeks in the KGB prison, Sapega was placed under house arrest, first with Protasevich, then alone from October.
If they had been able to talk to their daughter on the phone and even meet them in Minsk up until then, this was suddenly forbidden, says her stepfather Duditsch.
"Since then, we have effectively been in an information vacuum." He was able to find out little about the lawyers.
Sapega is under constant surveillance and had to spend months in an apartment in Lida, her parents' hometown, around 100 kilometers north-east of Grodno, according to Duditsch.
She was only allowed to go outside the door to shop when she was accompanied by her minders.
She is not allowed to use computers or the Internet, says lawyer Gaschinsky.
Her stepfather Duditsch says he found out from several sources that his stepdaughter had probably survived a corona disease.
"We don't know how she was, we couldn't even help her."
He now hopes to see his stepdaughter more often in the courtroom in Grodno.
At least the start of the process should be public.
