The act of piracy through which Lukashenko had the Ryanair flight diverted to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich has turned the spotlight back on Belarus's authoritarianism. The act of piracy through which Lukashenko had the Ryanair flight diverted to arrest journalist Roman Protasevich has turned the spotlight back on Belarus's authoritarianism.
Belarus has returned to the international spotlight after diverting a Ryanair aircraft to Minsk, the capital. President Aleksandr Lukashenko ordered the arrest of journalist Roman Protasevich, who was on board and was living in exile in Lithuania. The act of air piracy was condemned by much of the international community and reignited debate about Belarusian authoritarianism, where electoral fraud, torture, muzzling of political opposition and media outlets are playing out in what amounts to Europe's last dictatorship. One that appears, however, to be living on borrowed time, thanks to the increasingly widespread protests that have been gripping the country for months.
President Aleksandr Lukashenko's purge has never spared the media, now or in the past. Roman Protasevich knows this all too well — a 26-year-old opposition journalist who has always been critical of the regime and has become a point of reference for the protests of recent months. In 2012, still only 17, he was arrested for running two anti-government groups online; he recounted having suffered violence in prison, but the regime's spotlight fell on him most intensely over the past year.
Nexta, the independent news outlet of which Protasevich is one of the founders, has become a point of reference for the protests of recent months. The Telegram channel Nexta Live, where news about the protests and the regime's abuses is published without the filter of Belarusian state power, and which managed to survive the internet blackout imposed by Lukashenko in the early stages of the protests, has amassed thousands of followers, with Protasevich serving as its editor-in-chief. His activity landed him on the blacklist of Europe's last dictator, who accused him of inciting hatred and of terrorist activity. The reason Protasevich was able to carry on his work is above all that, even before the 2020 elections, in view of the suffocating climate in Belarus for press outlets not aligned with the regime, he had moved to Lithuania in what amounted to a forced self-imposed exile.
This allowed him to remain beyond the reach of Lukashenko's purges, who then devised a way to lay his hands on the journalist: diverting to Minsk the Ryanair scheduled flight from Athens to Vilnius on which he was travelling with his girlfriend, at the moment it was flying over Belarusian territory.
The pilots of the flight reportedly received a bomb alert, a circumstance that under standard procedures requires landing at the nearest airport. In reality, this point is under investigation, since certain radar images suggest that, even while the Ryanair aircraft was still in Belarusian airspace, the airport of Vilnius was nevertheless closer. In any case, the plane proceeded to Minsk escorted by a Belarusian military jet; there were no bombs on board, and once it had landed, Roman Protasevich, his girlfriend Sophia Sapega and three other individuals whose identities are unknown were arrested, as they were wanted for terrorism and extremism.
In recent hours, a video was released from Belarusian prisons, in which the journalist says he is well and that the authorities are treating him with care. However, bruises and injuries visible on his body suggest otherwise. The international community has raised its voice, most notably the European Union. The High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, called for the immediate release of Roman Protasevich and the launch of an investigation, while Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke of the "outrageous and illegal behaviour of the Belarusian regime." The diversion of a civilian scheduled aircraft to arrest a dissident journalist was described by Ryanair as "an act of air piracy", one of the most serious violations of international law.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of airlines have stopped overflying Belarus, while the EU has banned flights to the continent by Belarusian carrier Belavia.
This is just one of the consequences of President Lukashenko's show of force, accompanied by the sweeping international sanctions already announced but not yet finalised, which risk having a severe impact on an already economically fragile country that will now seek to draw even closer to Moscow and to his ally Vladimir Putin.
Belarus enjoyed the new freedoms that arrived in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its independence for only a very short time. Just three years later, power was seized by Aleksandr Lukashenko, who, 27 years on, still holds it today. From the outset, the president curtailed rights — a kind of toll the population had to pay in exchange for greater social welfare in the form of food and employment in a country living in extreme poverty as a result of the economic crisis.
During the 1990s, throughout his first term, Lukashenko imposed the Russian language, stripped the Parliament of power, strengthened the death penalty and began targeting voices of opposition, both in politics and in Belarus's vibrant cultural world, going so far as to ban concerts by certain bands deemed inconvenient on account of their song lyrics. Then came the scourge of political prisoners, which has continued through the subsequent twenty-plus years up to the more than 400 detentions of today, as have the other forms of repression practised by the president-dictator. All the while he has continued to hold on to power, with elections that each time have come under the scrutiny of international observers owing to methods that are, at the very least, suspect. In 2006, for instance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) declared "undemocratic" the vote that delivered the president a victory of over 80 per cent, even as foreign leaders — including former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — sang his praises and ensured, through their friendly relations with him, that every act of fraud went unpunished.
This is why every new election has been followed by protest demonstrations from the population, which year after year have grown ever more widespread as the president has lost popularity. Until 2020, when Lukashenko proclaimed yet another victory in the August vote, not recognised by the European Union and contested on grounds of widespread electoral fraud. From that moment on, the country has been gripped by the largest protests in its history, which — unlike in the past — have spread far beyond the capital Minsk and have drawn in not just activists and opposition figures, but the entire Belarusian population.
The marches are still continuing today — they have never stopped — and Lukashenko has demonstrated the full extent of his authoritarianism in the way he has sought to suppress dissent. In the first week of protests there were 7,000 arrests, a figure that subsequently rose to 12,000 in total, and the country's prisons have filled with figures from the political and journalistic opposition. Hundreds of cases of torture have been documented, at least five people have died, around fifty have disappeared, and cases of sexual violence and rape by the security forces have been reported — so much so that in recent days the UN has opened an investigation into human rights violations.
The act of air piracy through which Belarus had journalist Roman Protasevich arrested in violation of international law fits into this context of steady decline in human rights. The international community no longer appears willing to stand by and watch, and after the condemnations of recent months is now preparing a diplomatic offensive of considerable weight against Aleksandr Lukashenko.
