Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for treason after declaring herself the leader of Belarus and setting up a government in exile after the 2020 presidential election.
Tsikhanouskaya, who fled her native country in 2020 to Lithuania, was sentenced in absentia by a Belarusian court on Monday after being found guilty of high treason and “conspiracy to seize power.”
Four others, who have also fled Belarus, were also tried for harming national security, with opposition politician Pavel Latushka sentenced to 18 years in prison, while three others were handed 12-year sentences, France24 reports.
The charges stem from the aftermath of the 2020 Belarusian presidential election in which Ms Tsikhanouskaya ran against current president Alexander Lukashenko and officially received just over ten per cent of the vote with 588,619 votes to Present Lukashenko’s 4,661,075 votes.
However, many, including Tsikhanouskaya, did not accept the results, with Tsikhanouskaya claiming that instead of receiving around ten per cent, she had received 70 per cent of the votes and declared she was the rightful president.
Large protests against President Lukashenko were seen in the streets of Belarusian cities for weeks after the election results, with 100,000 estimated to have turned out for a protest 50 days after the election itself.
Amid the protests, Tsikhanouskaya and several other opposition leaders fled the country, with Tsikhanouskaya departing for nearby Lithuania, where she remains to this day.
During her time abroad, Tsikhanouskaya has attempted to claim that she is the rightful president of Belarus and stated that President Lukashenko is no longer a legitimate leader.
Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of last year, Tsikhanouskaya took to Twitter to declare that she had appointed herself the leader of Belarus and declared President Lukashenko to be a traitor.
“He made our country a participant in the invasion of Ukraine. So I declared myself as the national leader of Belarus to protect the sovereignty & independence of our country, represent it in security negotiations & crisis management in the region,” she said.
In November of 2022, the website POLITICO published an opinion piece by Tsikhanouskaya declaring her the “leader of democratic Belarus” in which she again asserted her claim to the presidency.
“I beat Lukashenko in the general election of 2020 before he stole it back with the help of the KGB, the siloviki security forces and Putin,” she wrote and later added, “I am the Belarusian president-elect. I am fighting for my country in exile. But I continue to support our people. And together, we will prevail.”
While the Lithuanian parliament adopted a resolution in 2020 to recognize Tsikhanouskaya as the leader of Belarus, few other countries formally recognise her claim.