Belarus: I'm ready to beg for help, says mother of detained woman

For Anna Dudich, nothing will ever be the same again.

Her daughter, Sofia Sapega, was on board Ryanair Flight 4978 from Athens to Vilnius when the plane was forcibly diverted to the capital of Belarus.

Sofia and her boyfriend, the prominent opposition activist Roman Protasevich, were arrested on arrival in Minsk.

"We are in such a state that we don't believe this is happening to us, to our daughter," Dudich tells me, her eyes brimming with tears.

The last she heard from her daughter was a text message with a single word, "Mama", before the phone went dead.

"I'm ready to beg anyone for help, so my child's life isn't broken," Dudich says.

When we meet, she's just dropped off a parcel of clothes, food and toiletries - no books allowed - at the KGB prison where Sapega, 23, has been remanded in custody for two months.

Relatives are not permitted to visit, so all Dudich has seen of her daughter is a video where she confesses to publishing the personal data of Belarusian security forces.

She was deeply upset at seeing her daughter in distress and is sure she was speaking under duress. Sofia twists and turns in the video clip, rolling her eyes, which Anna says isn't at all normal for her.

She tells me that Sapega, who was born in Russia, is not an activist and didn't even join last year's protests after the disputed presidential elections. She left for Vilnius in Lithuania in August. She believes her daughter was arrested solely because of her link to Roman Protasevich, who she began dating about six months ago.

"I don't understand why my daughter was detained,"Dudich says. "She's just living her life like a normal young woman - studying, having fun and in love. No one banned that, did they? I just can't get my head around it."

On Wednesday, the Belarusian president delivered a defiant speech, rejecting international condemnation that called the plane diversion an act of "air piracy" or "hijacking" - staged purely to arrest a prominent political opponent as he passed through Belarusian airspace.

In his first comments since the plane's grounding, President Alexander Lukashenko insisted there was a genuine bomb threat and that he'd acted "legally" and to "save lives".

"What was I supposed to do?" he asked a chamber full of loyal officials.

But his speech contained worrying signals for Dudich.

Lukashenko talked of a "terrorist" on board the flight, a reference to Roman Protasevich, and labelled him and his girlfriend agents of Western intelligence.

In the same vein, he said new European sanctions in response to the incident were part of a plot to force him from power.

"Our ill-wishers both outside and inside Belarus have changed their methods of attack," the president declared. "They have crossed many red lines and crossed the boundaries of common sense and human decency. They've moved from plotting riots, to suffocating us."

The impact of the sanctions - banning Belarus's national airline from Europe and preventing European airlines from crossing its airspace - began to sink home on Wednesday when a Belarusian flight attempting to reach Barcelona ended up circling over the border with Poland before being forced to turn back.

In Minsk, the foreign ministry called that "virtually air piracy" and part of the "political hysterics" in Europe over the Ryanair flight diversion.

The EU, however, has pledged to follow up on its flight ban with further economic sanctions.

But in parliament, President Lukashenko seemed to shrug off the prospect of increasing isolation. He reminded Russia in his speech that hostile forces in the West are a common threat, claiming that Belarus is a mere "testing ground" and Russia the ultimate target.

Russia gave critical backing to the president last year when his quarter-century grip on power threatened to slip, and Lukashenko will meet Vladimir Putin again on Friday.

The Ryanair flight incident shows just how far that support has emboldened him: the Kremlin says it has "no reason not to trust" his description of events.

But the move has broken two more families in Belarus, with two more people behind bars.

"I'm frightened for her," Dudich says of her daughter, who is still waiting to see a lawyer in her KGB prison. "She's still a kid. A normal student. I am sure all this is a mistake."