ST. PETERSBURG, Russia – President Vladimir V. Putin insisted on Friday that Russia wants to be “neutral” on the events in Belarus in order to distance his country from the uproar over the forced diversion of a passenger plane with a Belarusian dissident on board.
Putin’s comments at Russia’s premier economic conference in St. Petersburg came the day after arrested dissident Roman Protasevich appeared on Belarusian state television with bruises on his wrists. Mr Protasevich confessed to organizing anti-government protests – an interview his family, supporters and Western officials said were conducted under duress.
“Belarus has many problems, domestic ones, and we really want to take a neutral position,” said Putin.
Putin’s reluctance to support Belarusian leader Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, Russia’s closest ally, showed the pressure on Lukashenko’s crackdown and arrest of Mr Protasevich. While Putin fears that Lukashenko’s fall could be a geopolitical loss for Russia, the unpredictable and brutal repression of the Belarusian leader is also becoming a problem for the Kremlin.
On Friday, Western officials condemned the interview with Mr Protasevich, and the European Union continued the previously planned sanctions prohibiting Belarusian airlines from flying over EU territory. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz attended the St. Petersburg conference by video link with Putin and called the “forced confession” by Protasevich something that “we do not consider to be acceptable in any way”.
For Putin, Belarus is an important ally, perhaps the last post-Soviet country in Europe to steadfastly cling to Moscow. When hundreds of thousands of Belarusians rose against Lukashenko last summer, Putin’s support was crucial in keeping him in power.
But Putin also has a strained relationship with Lukashenko, and he seems keen to prevent the excitement over the diversion from disrupting his summit with President Biden, due to take place on June 16.
When asked if he believed Mr Lukashenko’s allegation that the Ryanair plane that Mr Protasevich flew in was crashed because of a bomb threat, Mr Putin replied: “I do not want to evaluate what happened to that plane. To be honest, I don’t know. “
He also denied that Russia knew in advance of the operation by Belarus to crash the commercial flight carrying Mr Protasevich between the capitals of two EU countries, Greece and Lithuania.
Understand the situation in Belarus
Belarus in the spotlight. The emergency landing of an airliner on Sunday is seen by several countries as a state hijacking demanded by their strong President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko.
Election results and protest. It came less than a year after Belarusians faced police violence in protesting the results of an election that many Western governments mocked as sham.
Forced plane landing. The Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, was diverted to Minsk to arrest 26-year-old journalist Roman Protasevich.
Who is Roman Protasevich? In a video released by the government, Mr. Protasevich confessed to participating in organizing “mass riots” last year, but friends say the confession was made under duress.
Despite his lukewarm comments, Putin showed no sign of withdrawing support for Lukashenko, who claims the protests against him have been manipulated by the West. Based on the topics of conversation on Russian state television, Mr Putin compared the protests in Belarus to the siege of the Capitol in Washington on January 6 and criticized the West for condemning the violence of the riot police in Belarus but not the arrests of the Capitol rioters in Belarus The United States.
“Everything is up to the people of Belarus,” said Putin. “Over there it’s all assessed in one light and tone, and then the same thing happens in the States, but everything is assessed differently.”
To underscore the continued support of Russia, the head of the Russian foreign intelligence service SVR met on Thursday with his counterpart in Belarus, who heads an espionage agency called KGB West, ”reported the official Belarusian news agency.
Mr Protasevich, the 26-year-old dissident journalist, is the former editor of NEXTA, an opposition account on the Telegram social network. Just last month he called Lukashenko a “dictator” and compared him to Hitler.
On May 23, Lukashenko climbed into a fighter jet to intercept the Ryanair flight – a move condemned by the international community and leaders across Europe – and after landing in Minsk, security forces kidnapped Mr Protasevich and his girlfriend. He is being held in a KGB prison, said his father and lawyer.
In the interview broadcast on Thursday evening, conducted by the head of a Belarusian state television broadcaster, a tearful Mr. Protasevich appeared worried and exhausted. He said that he “undoubtedly” respected Mr. Lukashenko before complimenting him.
European leaders condemned Mr Protasevich’s interview. A spokesperson for Chancellor Angela Merkel called the confession “totally unworthy and untrustworthy,” and British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said on Twitter that “those involved in the filming, coercion and conducting the interview must be held accountable “.
On Friday, as expected, the European Union officially implemented some of the sanctions its leaders agreed last week. It banned all Belarusian airlines from flying over the block’s airspace and landing at airports on its territory. Individual European countries had already taken similar measures.
“The EU member states will therefore be obliged to refuse aircraft operated by Belarusian airlines to land, take off or fly over their territory,” the EU Council said in a statement.
Mr Protasevich said in the interview that he organized unauthorized mass rallies, a charge punishable by up to three years in prison. He said he chose to do the interview voluntarily and that he was not put on any makeup to hide the traces of torture.
His blatant admission, which some observers likened to Stalin’s show trials in the 1930s, described the Belarusian opposition as worms who lead luxurious lifestyles on those countries’ payrolls in Lithuania and Poland. He also referred to his opposition colleagues as accomplices in his crimes and gave specific names.
Mr Protasevich’s turnaround is not unusual in Mr Lukashenko’s Belarus. Several opposition and media representatives have made similar abrupt turns in their public statements after spending time in Belarusian prisons. Yuri Voskresensky, a former political prisoner, described his own imprisonment as “hell”.
Speaking to TV Rain, an independent Russian television station, Mr Protasevich’s father, Dmitri Protasevich, called the interview “a propaganda video”.
“It is very difficult for him to say these things and I am sure that he was compelled and intimidated,” he said. “He’s been under pressure for more than a week.”
Dmitri Protasevich said Belarusian law enforcement agencies could also put pressure on his son through his girlfriend Sofia Sapega, who is also from the KGB. is being held
“She could be held in the cell next to him,” he said.
Conditions in such prisons are bleak, say former inmates. The Russian citizen Yegor Dudnikov was arrested by Belarusian law enforcement agencies in early May and has been in a KGB prison since then. In a letter to his lawyer, he described that he had been beaten and tortured to force a confession.
Mr Dudnikov, who said he was a technical specialist who helped opposition activists with videos, described being forced to make a statement to the state television station interviewing Mr Protasevich.
“On May 25, they took me to a room where they gave me answers that had already been prepared by the television crew,” he said in a letter to the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. “They gave me time to memorize them – on May 28th, television people came and made the recording.”
But Mr Putin, speaking at a personal international conference that brought together thousands of delegates despite the ongoing pandemic, said he cared little about Mr Protasevich’s plight.
“I do not know this novel Protasevich and I do not want to know him,” said Putin.
And Belarus was not on the list of topics, Putin said he plans to discuss with Mr Biden when the two meet in Geneva this month. Those issues, Putin said, would include strategic stability and arms control, international conflict, counterterrorism, the pandemic and the environment. Putin said Moscow and Washington needed to improve their relations from today’s “extremely low levels” but maintained his often-voiced view that the United States was solely responsible for the tensions.
“We have no disagreements with the United States,” Putin said. “They only have one difference of opinion: they want to stop our development, they talk about it publicly. Everything else flows out of this position. “
Anton Troianovski reported from St. Petersburg and Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow. Monika Pronczuk contributed the reporting from Brussels.
WARSAW — Since his teenage years as a rebellious high school student in Belarus and continuing into his 20s while in exile abroad, Roman Protasevich faced so many threats from the country’s security apparatus — of violent beatings, jail, punishment against family members — that “we all sort of got used to them,” a fellow exiled dissident recalled.
So, despite his being branded a terrorist by Belarus late last year — a capital offense — Mr. Protasevich was not particularly worried when he set off for Greece from Lithuania, where he had been living, earlier this month to attend a conference and take a short vacation with his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega.
But that sense of security was shattered on Sunday when they were snatched by Belarus security officials on the tarmac at Minsk National Airport after a MiG-29 fighter jet was scrambled to intercept his commercial flight home to Lithuania from Greece. Mr. Protasevich, 26, now faces the vengeance of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the 66-year-old Belarusian leader from whom he once received a scholarship for gifted students but has since defied with unflinching zeal.
In a short video released on Monday by the authorities in Belarus, Mr. Protasevich confessed — under duress, his friends say — to taking part in the organization of “mass unrest” last year in Minsk, the Belarus capital. That is the government’s term for weeks of huge street protests after Mr. Lukashenko, in power since 1994, declared a landslide re-election victory in an August election widely dismissed as brazenly rigged.
Stispan Putsila, the fellow dissident who described the atmosphere around Mr. Protasevich and the co-founder of opposition social media channels that Mr. Protasevich used last year to help mobilize street protests, said he had spoken to his friend and colleague before his departure for Greece about the potential risks.
They agreed, he said, that it was best to avoid flying over Belarus, Russia or any other state that cooperated with Mr. Lukashenko, but that flights between two European Union countries, Lithuania and Greece, should be safe.
He added that Mr. Protasevich might not have realized that the Ryanair flight he boarded in Athens on Sunday morning would fly over the western edge of Belarus, a route that opened the way for Mr. Lukashenko to carry out what European leaders condemned as a “state-sponsored hijacking.”
That something was amiss became clear at the airport in Athens, when Mr. Protasevich noticed a man he assumed to be a Belarus security agent trying to take photographs of him and his travel documents at the check-in counter.
Taking fright, however, was not in his character, Mr. Putsila said in an interview at the office of Nexta, the opposition news organization where Mr. Protasevich established himself as one of Mr. Lukashenko’s most effective and unbending critics.
“By his character Roman has always been very resolute,” Mr. Putsila said. “He refused to live in fear.”
Since Mr. Lukashenko took power in Belarus in 1994, however, that has been a very perilous proposition.
Mr. Protasevich has been resisting his country’s tyranny since he was 16, when he first witnessed what he described as the “disgusting” brutality of Mr. Lukashenko’s rule. That began a personal journey that would turn a gifted student at a science high school in Minsk into an avowed enemy of a government that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005 called “the last remaining true dictatorship in the heart of Europe.”
Mr. Protasevich was raised in an outlying district of Minsk in one of the city’s anonymous, concrete high-rises by a father who was a military officer and a mother who taught math at an army academy. He studied at a prestigious high school and won an award in a Russian science contest.
But in the summer after 10th grade, Mr. Protasevich was detained by the police while sitting on a park bench with a friend watching a so-called “clapping protest,” when a flash mob clapped to show opposition to the government, without actually uttering any forbidden statements. Mr. Protasevich was just watching, Natalia Protasevich, his mother, said in an interview.
“For the first time I saw all the dirt that is happening in our country,” he said in a 2011 video posted on YouTube . “Just as an example: Five huge OMON riot police officers beat women. A mother with her child was thrown into a police van. It was disgusting. After that everything changed fundamentally.”
A letter from the security services to his high school followed. He was expelled and home educated for six months, as no other school would take him, his mother said.
The family eventually negotiated a deal with the Ministry of Education. Mr. Protasevich could attend school, though only an ordinary one, not the elite lyceum he had been enrolled in before, but only if his mother resigned from her teaching job at the army academy.
“Imagine being a 16-year-old and being expelled from school,” Ms. Protasevich said. “It was this incident, this injustice, this insult,” that drove him into the political opposition, she said. “That is how he began his activism as a 16-year-old.”
Mr. Protasevich studied journalism at Belarusian State University but again ran into trouble with the authorities. Unable to finish his degree, he worked as a freelance reporter for a variety of opposition-leaning publications. Frequently detained and jailed for short periods, he decided to move to Poland, working for 10 months in Warsaw with Mr. Putsila and others on the Nexta team disseminating videos, leaked documents and news reports critical of Mr. Lukashenko.
Convinced that his work would have more impact if he were inside Belarus, Mr. Protasevich returned in 2019 to Minsk. But the political climate had only darkened there as Mr. Lukashenko geared up for a presidential election in 2020.
In November 2019, the police in Belarus detained a fellow dissident journalist, Vladimir Chudentsov, on what were denounced as trumped up drug charges as he was trying to cross the border into Poland.
Sensing serious trouble ahead, Mr. Protasevich decided to flee. On short notice, carrying only a backpack, according to his mother, he again left for Poland, Belarus’s western neighbor with a large population of exiles who had fled Mr. Lukashenko’s rule.
His parents followed him there last summer to avoid arrest after security agents pressured neighbors to speak with the parents about encouraging their son to return to Belarus, where he faced certain detention.
Mr. Protasevich stayed put in Warsaw, becoming a key opposition figure along with Mr. Putsila at Nexta, posting regular reports on the social media site Telegram. Mr. Putsila described their work as “activist journalism,” but added that Mr. Lukashenko had left no space for traditional journalism by shutting down any outlet inside Belarus that did more than parrot the government line.
Working from an apartment in central Warsaw near the Polish Parliament, Mr. Protasevich moved further away from traditional journalism after the disputed presidential election last August, taking an active role in organizing street protests through Nexta’s account on Telegram.
“He was more interested in organizing street action” than disseminating news, recalled Mr. Putsila, who also goes by the name Stepan Svetlov, an alias. “I would not say he was more radical, but he definitely became more resolute.”
Mr. Protasevich’s work crossed into the realm of political activism, not only reporting on the protests but also planning them. “We’re journalists, but we also have to do something else,” he said in an interview last year. “No one else is left. The opposition leaders are in prison.” Mr. Putsila said that Mr. Protasevich never advocated violence, only peaceful protests.
In September last year, Mr. Protasevich left Poland for neighboring Lithuania to join Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the principal opposition candidate in the August election who had been forced to flee. With Mr. Lukashenko’s other main rivals in detention, Ms. Tikhanovskaya had become the main voice of the Belarus opposition.
In November, prosecutors in Belarus formally charged Mr. Protasevich under a law that bans the organization of protests that violate “social order.” The security services also put him on a list of accused terrorists.
But Mr. Protasevich felt safe in the European Union, and even took to mocking the charges against him in his homeland.
“After the Belarusian government identified me as a terrorist, I received more congratulations than ever in my entire life for a birthday,” he told Nashe Nive, a Belarusian news site.
Mr. Putsila said he was stunned that Mr. Lukashenko would force a commercial airliner to land just to arrest a youthful critic but, with the benefit of hindsight, thinks the operation should not have come as a big surprise. The autocrat, he said, wanted to show that “we will reach you not only in Belarus but wherever you are. He has always tried to terrify.”
A measure of that was that when the plane was forced to land in Minsk on Sunday, Belarus security agents arrested not only Mr. Protasevich but Ms. Sapega, 23. Ms. Sapega, a law student at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, appeared to have been arrested over her association. She was not known to be a target in her own right. Her lawyer said Wednesday she would be jailed for at least two months and face a criminal trial.
A young woman who identified herself as Ms. Sapega, who had not been seen in public since her arrest, appeared in a video posted on Twitter on Tuesday by NTV, a state-controlled Russian television channel.
The woman said she had been on the same plane as Mr. Protasevich to Lithuania, where she said she served as an editor for the “Black Book of Belarus,” a Telegram channel that focuses on exposing police brutality and is banned by Belarus as an “extremist” organization. Clearly speaking under duress in Russian, she confessed to publishing the personal information of Interior Ministry officers, a criminal offense in Belarus.
Mr. Putsila noted that Nexta had received so many threatening letters and abusive phone calls that Polish police officers stand permanent guard on the stairwell leading to the office.
“The Lukashenko regime considers Roman one of its main enemies,” he said. “Maybe it is right.”
Another colleague, Ekaterina Yerusalimskaya, told the Tut.by news service that she and Mr. Protasevich once noticed a mysterious man tailing them in Poland, and reported it to the police. Still, Mr. Protasevich remained nonchalant. “He calmed himself by saying nobody would touch us, otherwise it would be an international scandal,” Ms. Yerusalimskaya said.
Mr. Protasevich’s mother said she worried about his safety but, breaking down in tears as she contemplated her son’s fate after his arrest in Minsk, added: “We believe justice will prevail. We believe all this terror will pass. We believe political prisoners will be freed. And we are very proud of our son.”
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Moscow.
A dog handler checking luggage from the Ryanair plane in Minsk, Belarus, on Sunday.Credit…Onliner.by, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
International outrage mounted on Monday as new details emerged about a brazen operation by the strongman leader of Belarus to divert a Ryanair passenger jet and arrest a dissident Belarusian journalist traveling on board.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken condemned the forced diversion, saying it was a “shocking act” that “endangered the lives of more than 120 passengers, including U.S. citizens.”
He demanded the “immediate release” of the journalist, Roman Protasevich.
“Initial reports suggesting the involvement of the Belarusian security services and the use of Belarusian military aircraft to escort the plane are deeply concerning and require full investigation,” Mr. Blinken said.
Britain ordered that “airlines avoid Belarusian airspace in order to keep passengers safe,” the transportation secretary, Grant Shapps, wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Shapps said that the operating permit for Belavia Belarusian Airlines was being suspended.
Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, an Irish-based low-cost carrier, called theoperation, which was directed by President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, a “state-sponsored hijacking.”
Leaders from the European Union were expected to meet Monday night to discuss possible penalties.
Sofia Sapega, the girlfriend of the arrested journalist, was also detained when the plane landed in Minsk on Sunday after a bogus bomb threat during its flight from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, her university in the Lithuanian capital said.
Ms. Sapega, a Russian citizen, was detained at the Minsk airport along with Mr. Protasevich under “groundless and made-up conditions,” the European Humanities University in Vilnius said in a statement demanding her release.
There was no word Monday morning from the Belarusian authorities on their whereabouts.
Lawyers seeking to help Mr. Protasevich said he was believed to be in a jail in Minsk operated by the Belarussian intelligence service. The Russian Embassy in Minsk said that Belarus had notified it of Ms. Sapega’s detention.
Roman Protasevich at a court hearing in 2017.Credit…Reuters
Five people who boarded in Athens were not on the plane when it finally arrived in Vilnius, the Lithuanian police said on Monday.
Mr. O’Leary said some of the passengers may have been agents of the Belarusian intelligence service, which is still known by its Soviet-era initials.
“We believe there were some K.G.B. agents offloaded at the airport as well,” Mr. O’Leary told Irish radio on Monday.
Mr. O’Leary said Ryanair was in the process of debriefing its crew and that the European Union and NATO were “dealing with” the situation.
The Lithuanian government called for Belarusian airspace to be closed to international flights in response to what it called a hijacking “by military force.”
The Lithuanian police said they had opened a criminal investigation, on suspicion of hijacking and kidnapping. Of 126 passengers who took off from Athens, 121 arrived in Vilnius, the police said. (Officials had earlier said there were about 170 passengers on the plane, and that six had stayed behind in Minsk.)
The Lithuanian police spoke to the pilots after they landed in Vilnius on Sunday evening, Renatas Pozela, the Lithuanian police commissioner general, said in a telephone interview.
Police investigators would be interviewing the passengers this week, he said.
“The pilots were the priority,” Mr. Pozela said. “We wanted to hear their stories. How did they see the situation? What did they do? Were there other planes?”
Mr. Pozela said he was not yet authorized to disclose any findings of the investigation.
An opposition rally to reject the presidential election results and to protest against the inauguration of President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko in Minsk, Belarus, in 2020.Credit…Tut.By, via Reuters
The chorus of condemnation and outrage from across the European Union swelled on Monday as leaders began discussing possible penalties they could direct at Belarus for its forcing down of a civilian passenger jet.
However, they are somewhat limited in the actions at their disposal, because there are already E.U. sanctions against Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the brutal and erratic leader of Belarus who has clung to power despite huge protests against his government last year, and dozens of his immediate associates.
In a summit scheduled to take place Monday evening, European leaders are expected to discuss adding aviation-related sanctions.
The options may include designating Belarusian airspace unsafe for E.U. carriers; blocking flights from Belarus from landing in E.U. airports, and sanctions against the national flag carrier, Belavia.
E.U. leaders also called for an investigation into the circumstances of the incident by the International Commercial Aviation Organization.
While the European Union considered its options, Lithuania — the original destination of the Ryanair flight and one of the countries that shares a border with Belarus — has said it is banning flights over Belarus and strongly advising its citizens not to travel there.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s minister for foreign affairs, said in a tweet that the government was responding to “unprecedented threats” from Belarus and would push for the European Union to impose further measures.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece, where the flight originated, said it was critical the European Union take specific action, especially in the context of the bloc’s frequent paralysis over foreign-affairs issues including a recent failure to agree on a statement regarding the Middle East conflict.
“Our inability to reach a consensus on recent events in Israel and Gaza — where as a union we failed to present a unified stance — must not be repeated,” Mr. Mitsotakis told the Financial Times. “The forcible grounding of a commercial passenger aircraft in order to illegally detain a political opponent and journalist is utterly reprehensible and an unacceptable act of aggression that cannot be allowed to stand.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, also promised action at the leaders’ summit.
“The outrageous and illegal behavior of the regime in Belarus will have consequences,” she said in a tweet Sunday evening, adding that there must be sanctions for those “responsible for the #Ryanair hijacking.”
President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus in April. Rather than try to blunt diplomatic fallout on Monday, he signed new laws cracking down further on dissent.Credit…Pool photo by Sergei Sheleg
Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the strongman ruler of Belarus and the most enduring leader in the former Soviet Union, appeared undeterred by the international outcry that has erupted after his country forced a civilian passenger jet to land and then arrested a dissident journalist who was onboard.
Rather than try to blunt diplomatic fallout on Monday, he signed new laws cracking down further on dissent.
The country placed bans on publishing unauthorized public opinion polls, on the livestreaming of unauthorized protests, and even on posting links to “banned” information.
The Belarusian Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Anatoly Glaz, insisted that what happened to the jet was in strict accordance with aviation rules and said the country was prepared to host international experts “in order to rule out any insinuations.”
Russia, Mr. Lukashenko’s main ally, stood by him.
Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, compared Sunday’s incident to the forced diversion of a plane carrying Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, which made an unscheduled landing in Austria when he was flying home from Moscow in 2013 after other European countries refused it permission to refuel or to use their airspace.
“I’m shocked that the West is calling the incident in Belarusian airspace ‘shocking,’” Ms. Zakharova wrote on Facebook.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, also refused to join the chorus of condemnation in the West.
“The international aviation authorities need to evaluate whether or not this followed or did not follow international norms,” he told reporters. “I cannot comment on anything in this situation.”
Passengers from the diverted flight arriving in Vilnius, Lithuania, its original destination. Credit…Petras Malukas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The tray tables were being raised and the seat backs returned to the upright position as passengers on Ryanair Flight 4978 prepared for the scheduled landing in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. Then, suddenly, the plane made an abrupt U-turn.
There was no explanation given.
It would be roughly 15 minutes before the pilot came over the intercom and announced that the plane would be diverting to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, according to those on board.
For many passengers, it seemed, at first, it was most likely just one of those unexpected delays that can be part of airline travel — perhaps a technical problem, some speculated.
For one passenger, however, the situation was clear. And frightening.
Roman Protasevich, a prominent Belarusian opposition journalist who had been living in exile since 2019, started to panic.
“He panicked because we were about to land in Minsk,” Marius Rutkauskas, who was sitting one row ahead of Mr. Protasevich, told the Lithuanian broadcaster LRT upon arrival in Vilnius. “He said: ‘I know that death penalty awaits me in Belarus.’”
Once in Belarus, Mr. Protasevich’s worries appeared more real than ever. The plane was surrounded by Soviet-looking officials in green uniforms, along with dogs, fire crews and technical workers from the airport.
Saulius Danauskas, a passenger who spoke to Delfi, a news website, after arriving safely in Vilnius, said it quickly became apparent to him that the notion of a bomb threat was all a ruse.
“When we landed people were standing around the plane doing nothing, looking pleased with themselves,” Mr. Danauskas said. “They didn’t let us out for half an hour,” he added. “If there was a bomb on the plane, why would they not let us out?”
Passengers were eventually told to descend in groups of five with their luggage, which was thoroughly checked by security officials.
Mr. Protasevich’s luggage was checked twice, passengers recalled. Then a security officer escorted him to the terminal, where he was arrested.
Most of the rest of the passengers were kept standing in a dark corridor for three hours. Some had to stand with their children. Guarded by security officials, they had no access to food, water or a toilet.
In retrospect, passengers noted how weird it all was.
Mantas, a passenger on the plane, told a Lithuanian news website that the pilot was “visibly nervous” during the landing in Minsk.
Alyona Alymova, one of the passengers, wrote about the experience in a Facebook post, noting that for much of the time there was only “light anxiety.”
“There was no clear understanding of what was going on,” she wrote.
Some passengers learned about the bomb threat only hours later, when they could connect to the internet.
In an Instagram post, one passenger said that they were “treated as prisoners in Minsk.” Hours later, they were allowed in an airport lounge area with a small cafeteria.
“I want to see who will be responsible for this chaos,” she said.
Roman Protasevich is a co-founder of a channel on the social media app Telegram that become a popular conduit for President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s foes to share information and organize demonstrations.Credit…EPA, via Shutterstock
A day after the dissident journalist Roman Protasevich was detained in a plot that most Hollywood producers would have dismissed as improbably dramatic, there has been no word about where he is, how long he could be held, or what will happen to him.
Mr. Protasevich, an exiled opposition figure, was taken into custody on Sunday after the flight he was on was intercepted while traveling from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, by a MIG-29 fighter jet under orders from the strongman president of Belarus, Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, and diverted to Minsk.
Mr. Protasevich is a co-founder and a former editor of the NEXTA channel on the social media platform Telegram, which has become a popular conduit for Mr. Lukashenko’s foes to share information and organize demonstrations.
Mr. Protasevich became a dissident as a teenager, drawing scrutiny from law enforcement. He was expelled from a prestigious school for participating in a protest rally in 2011.
He fled the country in 2019, fearing arrest. But he has continued to roil Mr. Lukashenko’s regime while living in exile in Lithuania, to the extent that he was charged in November last year with inciting public disorder and social hatred.
Also in November, the government’s main security agency in Belarus, called the K.G.B.,placed Mr. Protasevich’s name on a list of terrorists. If he is convicted of terrorism, he could face the death penalty.
The charges of inciting public disorder and social hatred carry a punishment of more than 12 years in prison.
Sofia Sapega, a 23-year-old Russian citizen and the girlfriend of Mr. Protasevich, was traveling with him on the flight, and she was also detained, according to a statement from the European Humanities University in Lithuania, where she is a student. The university said she was detained on “groundless” conditions and pleaded for help in securing her release.
An international arrivals board at Vilnius Airport, Lithuania, on Sunday, with the diverted flight at the top.Credit…Andrius Sytas/Reuters
Shortly after Ryanair Flight 4978 crossed in the airspace of Belarus, an alarming message came crackling over the radio.
The pilots were told of “a potential security threat on board.” A possible bomb.
The plane, headed from Athens in Greece to Vilnius in Lithuania, would have to be diverted to Minsk, the capital of Belarus.
And if there was any doubt about the seriousness of the situation, the pilots only needed to look out of their window, where a MIG-29 fighter had suddenly appeared to escort them.
Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the ruler of Belarus who is often referred to as “Europe’s last dictator,” personally ordered the fighter jet to intercept the passenger plane — a fact his office proudly noted in a news release.
According to the statement, Mr. Lukashenko gave an “unequivocal order” to “make the plane do a U-turn and land.”
After the plane was forced to land, Roman Protasevich, a dissident journalist, was arrested. His girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, was also on the flight, and she, too, did not board the plane again.
The country’s interior ministry announced Mr. Protasevich’s arrest in a statement that was later deleted from its official Telegram channel.
After about seven hours on the ground in Minsk, the passenger jet, a Boeing 737-800, took off for Vilnius, landing there safely 35 minutes later.
No bomb was found on board, according to law enforcement authorities in Belarus. The Investigative Committee, Belarus’s top investigative agency, said it had opened a criminal case into a false bomb threat.
“Nothing untoward was found,” Ryanair said in statement.
Wizz Air, a discount carrier based in Hungary, said on Monday it had rerouted a flight from Kyiv, Ukraine, to Tallinn in Estonia to avoid flying in Belarus airspace.Credit…Andrew Boyers/Reuters
Some airlines in Eastern Europe began diverting their planes to avoid Belarus airspace on Monday, a day after that country’s leader sent a fighter jet to force down a Ryanair flight, allowing the authorities to seize an opposition journalist on board.
The shocking move has unleashed a storm of criticism against Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the Belarus president who has clung to power despite huge protests last year. The European Union is considering penalties against the country.
At least two airlines said that they were diverting flights away from Belarus airspace as a precaution, but most carriers seem to be waiting to be told what to do by the European authorities.
Later in the day, Lithuania’s transport commissioner announced that all flights to and from Lithuanian airports must avoid the airspace of neighboring Belarus, Reuters reported. The minister, Marius Skuodis, said the ban would begin Tuesday at 3 a.m. local time.
Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, on Monday condemned the actions of the Belarus authorities, who ordered the plane, flying from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania, to land in the Belarus capital of Minsk and then arrested Roman Protasevich, a dissident journalist on board, and his companion.
“This was a case of state-sponsored hijacking, state-sponsored piracy,” Mr. O’Leary told interviewers on Newstalk, an Irish radio broadcaster.
Mr. O’Leary, however, said he was waiting for instructions from European Union authorities in Brussels about whether to steer other flights away from Belarus.
He added that it would be an easy matter for his flights to avoid Belarus. “We don’t fly over Belarus much,” he said. “It would be a very minor adjustment to fly over” Poland instead, he added. Ryanair, a discount airline based in Ireland, describes itself as Europe’s largest airline group.
Some analysts say that the European Union may be reluctant to ban flights over Belarus because such a move would create difficulties for European airlines. Airlines are already avoiding Ukraine, the country’s southern neighbor, because of conflict with Russia, and so putting Belarus air space off limits as well would present serious routing difficulties on flights between Europe to Asia.
“Flying to Asia from Europe without crossing Belarus is likely too costly and challenging,” wrote analysts from Eurasia Group, a research firm, in a note on Monday.
Other airlines, flying shorter routes, are already making changes.
AirBaltic, the Latvian national airline, said that its flights would avoid entering Belarus airspace “until the situation becomes clearer or a decision is issued by the authorities.” The rerouted flights include ones from Riga, the airline’s home base, to Odessa in Ukraine and Tbilisi in Georgia.
Another airline that flies in the area, Wizz Air, said that it would alter the path of a flight from Kyiv in Ukraine to Tallinn in Estonia so as to skirt Belarus.
“We are continuously monitoring and evaluating the situation,” a spokesman for Wizz Air, which is based in Hungary, said.
