Ryanair plane ‘hijack’: what next for Belarus?

The EU and Washington have condemned Belarus for forcing a plane bound for Lithuania to make an emergency landing in Minsk in order to arrest an exiled opposition journalist on board.

The Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was in Belarusian airspace when the country’s authorities scrambled a fighter jet to divert the passenger plane to Belarus’ capital on Sunday afternoon.

The drastic move and subsequent arrest show just how far President Alexander Lukashenko “is prepared to go to suppress opposition after disputed elections last year”, says the BBC’s James Landale. “The EU now has to decide what price it is prepared to make him pay.”

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What happened?

Ryanair said its crew had been “notified by Belarus (Air Traffic Control) of a potential security threat on board and were instructed to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk”. The airport said there had been rumours of a bomb on board, but “no bomb was found when the plane was searched”, The Telegraph reports.

But “Belarusian officials took the opportunity” to arrest Belarusian journalist and activist Roman Protasevich, says the newspaper.

The Guardian reports that his Russian-born girlfriend Sofia Sapega, who is studying at a university in Lithuania, was travelling with him on the flight from Greece and was also detained.

According to fellow passengers, Protasevich was trembling and “super-scared” before being led away by police. “I’m facing the death penalty here,” he reportedly told other passengers.

State media in Belarus said the order for the diversion and arrest was issued by Lukashenko, who has cracked down on dissenting voices since winning a disputed election last August.

Protasevich is accused of organising mass riots and of inciting social hatred - allegations that he denies. The mass unrest charges against him carry a sentence of up to 15 years.

Michael O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive, called it an “act of aviation piracy” and said he understood that Belarusian KGB agents may have been on board.

Who is Roman Protasevich?

Now aged 26, Protasevich first attracted the attention of the Belarusian authorities as a teenager, when he was expelled from school after taking part in a protest.

He went on to become an editor for Poland-based online news service Nexta, which used the Telegram messenger app to circulate footage of protests against Lukashenko last year.

Nexta was subsequently designated an extremist organisation and banned from Belarus by the authorities in Minsk. Lukashenko’s government has also called for the extradition of Protasevich, who left Belarus in 2019 to live in exile in Lithuania.

He now works for another Telegram channel, Belamova, after stepping in to take over from blogger Igor Losik, who was arrested by the Belarusian authorities in June last year.

Belarus opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya has said she is “afraid, not only for his freedom but for his life”. She told Sky News on Monday that Protasevich is “considered to be a private enemy of Lukashenko” and that she fears he is being “tortured” because “he knows a lot of information”.

What next?

Protasevich’s arrest has triggered a “global outcry”, says The Guardian, with the EU’s executive describing the plane diversion as a “hijacking”. The US State Department has also condemned the “shocking act”, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying that President Joe Biden’s administration was “coordinating with our partners on next steps”.

European leaders are meeting today to discuss what action might be taken against Belarus, after European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen warned that “the outrageous and illegal behaviour... will have consequences”.

Bloc leaders are facing growing calls from countries including Poland to impose sanctions. Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nauseda has argued that such measures “could make a larger impact on the behaviour of the Belarusian regime”.

The head of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez, has also called for a ban on flights over Belarus. And some officials have suggested that “cars and lorries could be stopped from entering the EU from Belarus”, the BBC reports.

But Nataliya Vasilyeva, Russia correspondent for The Telegraph, argues that the incident, which “would seem brazen and reckless for most world leaders”, was just another move from Lukashenko “to cow his opponents in the face of an underwhelming Western response to staggering atrocities of his regime”.

His recent attacks against Belarusian civil society “show an utter neglect for international law” and “there is not much that Europe can do to hurt the Belarusian economy” as it largely relies on Russia for trade, energy experts and loans, says Vasilyeva.

Russia, as well as China and Iran, will be among the countries watching the world’s next moves closely, says Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times.

“If even tiny Belarus can demand that a plane divert to Minsk, what is to stop the Iranians from compelling a plane to land in Tehran, or the Russians from forcing a jet down over Siberia?” he says.

“Once the precedent is established, the potential threat will extend well beyond countries’ own citizens — and even beyond their own borders.”

Rachman urges the EU, the US, the UK and others “to defend international law and order, before it is too late”.