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European leaders have called for an immediate international response after Belarus forced a Ryanair flight to Lithuania to land in Minsk on Sunday and arrested one of its passengers, an opposition activist.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Belarus’ opposition leader, said online activist Roman Protasevich, a resident of Lithuania, had been detained in the Belarusian capital.
“From now on (no one flying over Belarus) can be safe,” he wrote on Twitter, after Ryanair’s FR4978 flight from Athens to Vilnius was unexpectedly diverted to Minsk.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on Twitter that the forced landing was “totally unacceptable” and called on Belarus to allow all passengers to travel safely to Vilnius. “Any violation of international air transport standards must have consequences,” he wrote.
Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called for Protasevich’s speedy release and said he would raise the issue at an EU summit on Monday. “I call on NATO and EU allies to react immediately to the threat posed by the Belarusian regime to international civil aviation,” Nauseda said in a statement on his website.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote on Twitter that he would call for “immediate sanctions” against Belarus. “The hijacking of a civilian plane is an unprecedented act of state terrorism. It cannot go unpunished,” Morawiecki wrote.
Protasevich, 26, is the former editor of Nexta, the Warsaw-based media group that played a prominent role in both covering and directing huge protests against Lukashenko last year.
Belarusian President Alexander personally gave an “irrevocable order to turn the plane around and land it” before it left Belarusian airspace, according to a message posted on a semi-official presidential channel on the messaging app Telegram.
Belarusian security forces did not immediately confirm whether Protasevich had been arrested.
Ryanair flight to Minsk International Airport on Sunday © AFP via Getty Images
In November, Belarus placed Protasevich on a terrorist watch list and charged him with three protest-related crimes, the most serious of which carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.
The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Protasevich had been “arrested by the Minsk regime”.
Ryanair said the flight crew “was notified by Belarus [air traffic control] of a potential security threat on board and were instructed to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk ”.
“Nothing inadequate was found and authorities authorized permission to leave along with the passengers and crew after about five hours on land in Minsk,” it said in a statement. The company “has notified the relevant national and European safety and security agencies”.
According to messages sent by Protasevich to his colleagues, he noticed that he was being followed by a man who suspected him of being a Belarusian KGB agent while he was in the Athens exit hall. The man stood behind him in the boarding queue and tried to take a photo of his documents, the activist wrote in text messages to his colleagues. Protasevich said the man then asked him a “stupid question” in Russian and left. The plane took off near the Lithuanian border and landed in Minsk, according to flight tracking data.
Andrei Gurtsevich, a senior air force commander, said Belarus had decided to revolt over a MiG-29 fighter jet to accompany the plane after learning of a bomb threat, “said Belta, the state news agency. Airport officials later said the bomb threat was “false.”
Nexta has provoked Lukashenko’s anger over its coverage of last year’s protests and the brutal repression the Lukashenko regime unleashed in response. Its channel in Telegram has more than 1.2 million subscribers, a huge audience in a country of just 9.5 million people.
Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets in a show of unprecedented discontent after the former head of collective farms, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 27 years, claimed victory over Tsikhanouskaya in an election. deeply flawed presidential elections last year.
Most of the main opposition figures are in exile, such as Tsikhanouskaya, which is based in Lithuania, or in prison.
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