An independent Russian rights group says Belarus has repatriated a Russian activist and journalist detained while observing the trial in Minsk of the prominent Vyasna (Spring) human rights center, instead of releasing Yekaterina Yanshina as expected after a 15-day jail sentence.
The OVD-Info organization said Yanshina had contacted a relative after her deportation to a Moscow airport.
Yanshina has cooperated in the past with the Memorial human rights group, which is now banned in Russia.
She was taken into custody in a courtroom in Minsk on January 6 and sentenced to 15 days in jail on administrative charges of petty hooliganism for allegedly streaming and taking photos of the proceedings against four Vyasna (Spring) activists, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Byalyatski.
Byalyatski and his three associates are on trial on smuggling and tax-evasion charges that rights defenders and Western governments call politically motivated retribution on the part of longtime authoritarian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka.
Yanshina's 15-day jail term was scheduled to end on January 20 but she did not emerge from the Minsk detention center where she was being held.
OVD-Info said that, once in the Russian capital, she contacted a relative.
The Belarusian authorities kept all of Yanshina's belongings, it said.
The Front Line Defenders (FLD) rights group describes Yanshina as a human rights defender and journalist who has worked since 2021 with a rights-media outlet for lawyers and began collaborating with Human Rights Center Memorial last year.
Vyasna's Byalyatski, the banned Human Rights Center Memorial, and the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, which has chronicled alleged atrocities since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October.
The Memorial group, which long documented Soviet-era crimes but also tracked Putin-era abuses, was labeled an "undesirable" organization by Russian authorities.
The Vyasna defendants have been in Belarusian custody since July 2021 and face up to 12 years in prison if convicted.
Byalyatski and two other men, along with a fourth defendant who is being tried in absentia, are accused of bringing money into the country for "illegal activities and financing Vyasna," the largest rights body in the former Soviet country and one of the main sources of information on political detentions and arrests.
Lukashenka has appeared increasingly compliant to Moscow since launching a brutal crackdown after a flawed presidential election in 2020 in which he claimed a sixth presidential term.
He has also shown his willingness to allow Russian troops to use Belarusian territory to stage their unprovoked full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine since February.