The lines that keep getting crossed in international politics
Over the weekend Belarusian authorities diverted Ryanair Flight 4978 from Greece to Vilnius from its flight path with a fake bomb threat. The plane was closest to the Vilnius airport and standard operating procedure would have meant the plane would have landed there. Instead, Belarus forced the plane to land in Minsk. It did this with the assistance of a MiG-29 fighter jet designed to coerce the pilots into landing.
Once the Ryanair flight was on the ground, Belarusian authorities arrested Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist, along with his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. All told, five people exited the plane in Minsk, with three of them likely agents of the Belarusian KGB. According to the BelTA state news agency, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko personally ordered the fighter escort that forced the commercial jet to land.
In the history of commercial air travel, there have been terrorist hijackings and the accidental shooting down of civilian planes by militaries. This — a recognized state using military force to ground a plane and then abduct a passenger — is something new and altogether unsettling. The chief executive of Ryanair eventually described the event as a “state-sponsored hijacking.”