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What should Poland do with the problem of Belarus? [1800]
"Landing."
by Dmitry Petrovsky
A passenger plane rises into the air. It is about to reach its destination airport when a dispatcher calls for it to land. Fighter jets take to the skies. As the plane lands, the special services detain one of the passengers. While others are swearing, calling home ("honey, the plane has landed, who knows how long we'll be stuck here") and demanding compensation, the passenger is taken straight to interrogation.
This is 2016, the passenger's name is Armen Martirosyan. The plane belonged to the Belavia company and landed in Kiev. Martirosyan was suspected of having ties with Russia and organizing unrest in Ukraine at the behest of the Kremlin. The scandalous episode did not end well: the passenger was released after a few hours, and the then Ukrainian President Poroshenko apologized to the permanent leader of Belarus.
But a niggle remained. Now the official Minsk says that it is a chain of coincidences. They say that the air traffic controller received a bomb threat, passed it on to the plane, the pilots landed at the nearest airport, and Roman was among the passengers by coincidence. Well, maybe... Who knows, maybe there was a message, and who sent it is also unclear, there are many people interested in the scandal. Or maybe then, in 2016, Alexander Grigoryevich (Lukashenko) tied a knot in his memory and remembered this combination for the future.
Now, when Roman Protasevich, who is considered a terrorist in his homeland, returned to Minsk in a similar way, the Internet community is divided into two camps. Some believe that this was an unprecedented violation of international law, a seizure and terrorist attack, and call to immediately raise all possible anathemas against the Belarusian president. Others congratulate the Belarusian KGB for the brilliant operation, which has no analogues.
I cannot adhere to either of them, despite my desire. If it is an operation, there is nothing unique about it. The first case I know of was in 2004, when a private plane carrying a Russian citizen, Council of Federation member and former Deputy Minister Andrey Vavilov, was forcibly grounded in the U.S. He, like Protasevich, was taken for interrogation right from the airport.
In 2012, Turkey boarded a Moscow-Damascus flight. In 2017, the British escorted the Ryanair flight from Kaunas, but they did not detain anyone and did not find anything on board (it seems), although they searched everyone. Finally, in 2013, Bolivian President Evo Morales was grounded in Austria. Only because it was believed that Edward Snowden was flying with him.
This case is important for us not because the "civilized world" rightfully humiliated the head of a sovereign state. What matters is who they were looking for on that plane. Snowden, whom even some Americans consider a fighter for freedom of speech who revealed important secrets to the world. Snowden, who, if he had been born later, and not in America, but somewhere in the CIS, would most likely have started an anonymous Telegram channel and would have leaked all his findings there. But to the U.S. authorities, Snowden is a terrorist and a traitor.
Whether Lukashenko is right or wrong, whether he is taking revenge or playing another chess game, whether the Belarusian special services or, say, the European ones invented the mysterious letter about the bombing in order to leak Protasiewicz and to draw the Belarusian protest out of the American sphere of influence or back into their own, we will never know.
Obviously, there is nothing new going on, and the players' actions are prompted by the logic of the surrounding world, in which "everything is relative" and in which we have all existed for decades.
When the U.S. forces a plane to land, it is "democracy" and "good with fists" for some and lawlessness for others. The Ukrainian army shooting up the Donbass is "warriors of light" to one side and war criminals to the other. This list also includes Crimea and the bombing of Yugoslavia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and much, much, much more.
All the curses, all the sanctions that are about to fall on the "last dictator" will not be for the unexpected landing of a Ryanair flight, and not even for Protasiewicz. They will be for the fact that he dared to play a game that before was only allowed to be played by big boys or (like with Ukraine) with the permission of big boys. And Lukashenko will be blamed for simply being on the wrong side of the barricades.
