How the West must handle Lukashenko's threat
World leaders must pressure Vladimir Putin
Read the full article at The Dispatch
Alexander Lukashenko’s 27 years in power in Belarus have been marked by murder, brutality, and repression. Most of the international community deems him illegitimate, especially after his efforts to steal last August’s presidential election. Now Lukashenko, the head of Europe’s last dictatorship, has written a new chapter in the authoritarians’ playbook titled “State Sponsored Air Piracy and Hijacking.”
On Sunday, Lukashenko ordered a military aircraft to intercept a commercial airliner as it flew over Belarus’ airspace and forced it to land on the pretext that there was a bomb aboard. On the Ryanair flight passenger manifest from Athens to Vilnius Sunday was Roman Protasevich, a prominent Belarusian journalist and founder and former editor-in-chief of the popular Telegram channels Nexta and Nexta Live, and his Russian girlfriend. Lukashenko had been pursuing Protasevich as a “terrorist”—a trumped up charge that merely acknowledges his criticism of the regime.
Belarusian and/or Russian agents—and the exact Russian role here is fuzzy, but the two countries’ spy agencies work closely together—had tracked Protasevich at the airport in Athens and on board the flight. They, in turn, alerted the security forces in Minsk that Protasevich was on board, along with his Russian girlfriend. As the plane flew over Belarusian airspace, Belarus air traffic control authorities notified the pilots about a possible security threat on board—there was no such threat—and directed the pilots to land in Minsk. In effect, the Belarusian state hijacked the plane. Pratasevich and his companion, Sofia Sapega, were immediately arrested and taken away by the authorities.
