MINSK

European leaders have decided to ban flights by the Belarusian state airline to the EU after Sunday’s incident in which a Ryanair civilian jet was forced to land in the country and an independent journalist, often critical of the government, was pulled off the plane and arrested.

High officials from across the continent blasted the Belarus government in extraordinarily harsh terms.

Belarus diverted and brought down the aircraft bound from Greece to Lithuania and its security services promptly arrested Roman Protasevich, 26.. He had criticised Alexander Lukashenko and had worked for the independent agency Nexta. The online media platform has a large following on Twitter and YouTube and was extremely critical of the 2020 presidential election in which Lukashenko won a sixth term — an outcome denounced as rigged by vast numbers of demonstrators last year.

The authorities in Minsk said they had ordered the Ryanair jet, headed from Athens to the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, after an alleged bomb threat against the plane was received. Though state authorities via the official BelTA new agency reported having found no bombs aboard the aircraft, an independent journalist on board was taken into custody.

Protasevich, 26, has criticised Alexander Lukashenko and had worked for the independent agency Nexta. The online media platform has a large following on Twitter and YouTube and was extremely critical of the 2020 presidential election in which Lukashenko won a sixth term — an outcome denounced as rigged by vast numbers of demonstrators last year.

The incident was unprecedented even by Belarusian standards and the current tensions.

Belarus depends heavily on de facto Russian subsides in the form of credits, cheap energy imports, and diplomatic support. However, Lukashenko has made relatively undisguised pronouncements that Belarus, despite an amorphous “union state” relationship with Moscow, will never relinquish its sovereignty to be absorbed by Russia.

He has amplified this theme the over the past month as the Kremlin intensified efforts at bolstering the notion of  union. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lukashenko are due for another meeting to cement even closer ties this month.

Many independent journalists, opposition supporters, and prominent opponents of Lukashenko have come to Lithuania and the capital has turned into a de facto exile spot for opponents of the regime.

Belarusian state news agencies reported the plane, passing through the western part of Belarus on the way to Vilnius, an EU and NATO member, was forced by Belarusian air controllers to make an almost 180-degree diversion to Minsk.

BelTA also said that Lukashenko ordered a MiG-29 jet fighter to force the plane to divert.

Nexta issued a statement saying that Belarusian authorities called in a false bomb scare in order to get the Ryanair flight to land in Minsk. When it did land, they allege that passengers on board were searched and Protasevich was detained. The plane was combed through as well, but no explosives were found.

Further suspicions were aroused as, according to the airplane’s flight path as shown on the flightradar24 website, the plane was far closer to Vilnius than Minsk when it diverted.

A Ryanair statement said the crew was “notified by Belarus (air traffic control) of a potential security threat on board and instructed to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk”.

“ALL passengers must be able to continue their travel to Vilnius immediately and their safety ensured,” EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Twitter. “Any violation of international air transport rules must bear consequences.”

“I call on NATO and EU allies to immediately react to the threat posed to international civil aviation by the Belarus regime,” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki denounced the diversion as “a reprehensible act of state terrorism”.

The plane was diverted four days after Belarusian authorities shut down the country’s most prominent independent media outlet, tut.by, accusing its owners of fraud and searching the homes of several journalists.

Plane, luggage on the tarmac

Nexta showed pictures of a dog handler inspecting some of the hundreds of pieces of luggage on the airport tarmac.

Lithuanian website Delfi.lt, quoted by Nexta, said passengers became aware of one man on board, presumably Protasevich, who became distraught at the news that the plane was landing in Minsk and was flanked constantly by an officer while passengers were taken off.

At the height of last year’s protests, more than 100,000 demonstrators swelled the streets of Minsk and other cities every week.

But police rounded up protesters in courtyards and suburbs far from the city centre – more than 30,000 have since been detained for long or short periods – and the rallies petered out. Authorities quickly snuffed out an attempt to rekindle them in March.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the defeated candidate in last year’s election who calls herself the legitimately elected president from exile in Lithuania, said Belarusian authorities had engineered the diversion.

“The regime forced the landing (of the) Ryanair plane in Minsk to arrest journalist and activist Roman Protasevich,” she said on Twitter, calling for the International Civil Aviation Organization to take action.

Tikhanovskaya took part in the presidential race after her husband, a leading candidate, was jailed. She said Protasevich had left Belarus in 2019 and covered the presidential election with Nexta which, along with a sister telegram channel, has some 2 million subscribers.