As you can see on the flightradar24.com map, the sky over Belarus is almost empty. Only single Russian and Belarusian passenger planes as well as Turkish and Chinese cargo planes pass through. Why is the matter of forcing an Irish airline Ryanair flight via Belarus to land on its territory important to Canada? Ireland is a neutral country.
The plane was flying from one NATO member state to another.
According to the independent news agency in Poland, oko.press, the plane kept the course to Vilnius and turned back only in the face of clear threat from an armed Belarusian fighter. When the pilot made the decision to change the course, the plane was several kilometers from the Lithuanian border. Flight FR4978 was almost twice as close to Vilnius airport as it was to Minsk. The plane departed from Minsk to Vilnius after a few hours without 6 passengers. At the airport in Minsk, the Belarusian authorities detained the opposition journalist Roman Protasiewicz together with his partner Sofia Sapiega, a Russian woman, a student of international law at the University of Vilnius.
As further reports by the oko.press agency, four men voluntarily resigned from returning on board, as to which information is still ambiguous. According to various reports, they were citizens of Russia and agents of the Belarusian KGB, following Protasiewicz at the airport in Athens. Ryanair himself was to support this version.
There might be more to the situation currently played out in the region.
The president – dictator of Belarus – Alexander Lukashenko most likely did not make the decision himself to force the plane to land. The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, could help him. Anyway, it is unlikely that Belarus would be able to independently carry out such a complicated intelligence operation of grounding a foreign plane. Most likely, with Russia’s support.
Putin is playing on destabilization in the region, trying to attract the increasingly lonely Lukashenko with Belarus to even stronger integration with Russia, to create something like a new union of Soviet states – an economic and military union of states under the command of Russia.
The weakening of Lukashenko’s position by imposing EU sanctions will only push Belarus into the arms of Russia. Putin was probably aware of this if his services took part in this action. Failure to impose sanctions on Russia at the same time may prove not so much insufficient as helping Putin change the balance of power in the region.
It turns out that it is becoming easier and easier for agents of the Belarusian KBG services and agents of the Russian GRU services to penetrate the West in order to get rid of people who are inconvenient for these regimes. After the “success” with Protasiewicz, Belarus and Russia may move to almost “wholesale” actions with their opponents in the West.
A change in the balance of power in the region would increase the risk of a threat to NATO member states in Eastern Europe, i.e., Poland and the Baltic states: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, but not only.
Canada, being a NATO member, should now actively support initiatives that strengthen security within NATO structures in Eastern Europe.
Ottawa’s consideration of sanctions against only Belarus may not be adequate.
The actions should be also aimed at those who helped Lukashenko in the preparation of the last incident.
The image is a screenshot taken from the live flightradar24.com website on 25th May
