Belarus ‘Hijacks’ Commercial Flight to Arrest Opposition Journalist

On Sunday, 23rd May, a commercial Ryanair plane was diverted to land in Minsk, Belarus to enable the arrest of an opposition figure to president Lukashenko, “Europe’s last dictator,” in a move labelled “kidnapping” and an “act of piracy” by Western officials. On Monday, sanctions were imposed on Belarus to block air traffic between the country and EU member states. Multiple airlines have diverted their flights away from Belarus’ airspace.

A Ryanair flight from Athens, Greece, to Vilnius, Lithuania, was in mid-air in the Belarusian airspace on Sunday when it was interrupted by Belarusian air traffic control, who instructed it to change course under the auspices of a false ‘bomb threat’ onboard the aircraft, according to an investigation launched by Lithuanian police. Guided by a Belarusian fighter jet sent to intercept it, the plane was then navigated to the Minsk airport.

After the landing, passengers were escorted out and kept in buses and at the airport for several hours while policemen conducted a search of the aircraft and the luggage in what some of the passengers described as a deflection attempt. At the same time, Roman Protasevich, a prominent opposition journalist, was detained together with his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Three additional people stayed in Minsk and did not eventually board again, who might have been agents of the Belarusian security agency, KGB, according to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary.

According to the New York Times, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, leading the operation, “personally ordered the fighter jet to escort the Ryanair plane.”

In a swift response, the actions of the Belarusian government were summarily denounced by Western officials. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen described the scene as a “hijacking” and said that such “outrageous and illegal behaviour … will have consequences.”

UK Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Tom Tugendhat labelled the interception an act of “air piracy” and a “hijacking that turned into a kidnapping.” A letter condemning Belarus’ actions was drafted and has already been signed by the chairs of parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committees and other representatives of Canada, Czechia, Estonia, the EU, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, the UK, and the US, as of 6 pm on Monday.

Notably, among other examples of strong language used in the letter, the statement also includes a denouncement of Lukashenko’s government as a whole, which is described as “illegitimate.” The relations between Belarus and the West have suffered consecutive blows since last year when large-scale protests, violently suppressed by the government, grew to enormous proportions in Belarus in relation to the alleged falsification of election results, in which Lukashenko claimed he had won his sixth term in power. Having started in May 2020 after the arrests of opposition leaders standing against Lukashenko in the August election, protests were met with a brutal response, in which hundreds of detainees were reportedly tortured and disappeared by police with impunity.

Due to these events of last year, the EU had already imposed sanctions on almost 60 Belarusian officials, citing human rights abuses. Now, top EU figures met to discuss further steps to take against Belarus in light of the aircraft incident. On Monday, all EU-based airlines were called upon to stop flying over Belarus. In addition, the process to ban Belarusian airlines from the EU airspace and airports was started. Lukashenko has himself added to the tensions by expelling Latvian diplomatic staff from Minsk after the mayor of the Latvian capital Riga hoisted flags of the Belarusian opposition.

A close ally of Russia, the Belarusian government has not expressed much willingness, if any at all, to accommodate the demands of the West and international organisations. It is likely that the recent events will contribute to further polarisation and an escalation of tensions between the two international blocks represented by the US and Russia. As early as Sunday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has “strongly condemned” the “brazen and shocking act to divert a commercial flight and arrest a journalist.”

The New York Times reports that Lukashenko’s focus on arresting Roman Protasevich can be attributed to the lack of remaining independent opposition news sources in Belarus after a crackdown on non-aligned media outlets during last year’s protests. The founder and former editor of Nexta, a news channel operated on Telegram, fled into exile in 2019. He has since been placed on a list of terrorists by Belarus’ KGB, which could result in a death penalty if he proceeds to be charged and convicted.

On Monday, the Belarusian government released a video, in which Protasevich appeared at a desk, speaking directly to the camera. While he stated that he had “no problems with [his] health” and that the police were treating him “absolutely correctly and according to the law,” the declarations were identified as likely coerced and forced, rather than sincere, by the prisoner’s father Dzmitry Protasevich.

At the same time, there might be a disinformation campaign underway by the Belarusian government against Protasevich. BBC correspondent Daniel Sanford has reported that an alternate history was being manufactured against, and attributed to, the Belarusian dissident on the Western internet, which would portray him as a cooperative of a Ukrainian neo-nazi militia.

Protasevich’s case has been compared to that of Julian Assange on social media, the latter’s name remaining among the trending topics on Twitter into Tuesday. 

Though official charges might differ in each case, being labelled a terrorist for anti-government journalism resembles Assange’s situation, as he is being detained and persecuted for helping to release classified government information and creating Wikileaks.org. Having been denied bail, Assange is held in the UK’s Belmarsh prison after a US extradition request was also denied in January this year, as reported by Lotuseaters.com.

Another comparison is being drawn between the Belarusian interception of the Ryanair aircraft and an incident from 2013, in which the (non-commercial) plane carrying the Bolivian then-president Evo Morales was made to land in Austria and was subsequently searched for Edward Snowden, a US whistleblower who had exposed the US mass-surveillance programme shortly before, who was falsely rumoured to be onboard. During this “diplomatic fiasco,” Portugal and France refused entry to Morales’ aircraft mid-air, which was then forced to seek an alternative refuel stop in Vienna, Austria. Suspecting that the European countries acted upon the bidding of the US in its “hunt” for Snowden, the incident caused many Latin American countries to denounce US’ practices, with Bolivia’s then-vice president decrying the “kidnapping by imperialism.”