On 23rd May, Ryanair Flight 4978, en route from Athens to Vilnius in Lithuania, was contacted by Belarusian ground authorities. They told the pilots of the plane, which was still in Belarusian airspace, that according to their “special services” there was a bomb on board. Threats had, they claimed, been sent to several airports including the Belarus capital Minsk, where they advised the pilots to land.
The pilots were apparently unconvinced: the plane, at the time, was considerably closer to Vilnius than Minsk so why land in Minsk? But there was another factor for them to consider: the Belarusians sent an air force fighter jet to escort the flight to Minsk, and when fighter jet pilots tell a passenger plane to follow them it is an “offer” they cannot easily refuse. The pilots complied.
The Belarusian authorities would later claim that the “bomb threat” came from Hamas. The authorities even cited the email allegedly sent to Minsk airport: “We, Hamas soldiers, demand that Israel cease fire in the Gaza Strip. We demand that the European Union renounce its support for Israel in this war.” Hamas promptly denied any connection to the incident. An investigation conducted by the Dossier Center established that the Minsk airport received the “Hamas bomb threat” 27 minutes after Belarusian ground authorities informed the flight of the alleged bomb.
Of course, there was no bomb. Belarusian authorities grounded the Ryanair flight with only one aim: to arrest one of the passengers, Belarusian opposition activist and journalist Raman Pratasevich. Pratasevich had played a prominent role in covering the mass anti-government protests in Belarus following last year’s stolen presidential elections, in which Alexander Lukashenko was declared the winner. Together with Pratasevich, his Russian girlfriend Sofia Sapega was arrested too. They have both been forced to appear on confession videos.
This violation of international norms has shocked the west. The UK and EU called for Pratasevich’s immediate release, and instructed their airlines to avoid Belarusian airspace as well as banning Belarusian airlines from entering UK and EU airspace. (The US also condemned the kidnapping.) Western governments are also deliberating whether to introduce a new set of sanctions against Belarusian officials in addition to the ones already in place, including on Lukashenko.
A number of commentators have suggested that Russia was directly involved or, at the very least, greenlit the operation. There were rumours that three passengers, who decided to stay in Minsk and not to proceed to Vilnius once the plane had been searched, were Russian citizens connected to the security services. However, this turned out to be false: one passenger was a Greek citizen, the other two were Belarusian.
Russian involvement seems unlikely. They could have helped identify Pratasevich in Greece. But he did not shy away from posting his geographic location on his social networks, and surely the Belarusian KGB could have worked it out? What about generating fake bomb threats? Or sending a fighter jet to escort the passenger flight to Minsk? The Belarusians did not need Russian help to do any of this.
The inconsistencies and plain absurdities coming from the Belarusian side suggest that the operation was devised by the Belarusian security services: low-quality operations are a trait of the Belarusian KGB.
Where, however, Russia is indeed heavily involved is in whitewashing Lukashenko’s regime and exculpating its outrageous operation. Russian officials and state-controlled media chose to use the technique they know best: distract. To do this, Russian actors are advancing two major narratives.
One narrative is based on the old Soviet trick of whataboutism: responding to one accusation by making a counter-accusation on an unrelated issue. This narrative presumes that Belarus did nothing wrong because the west has done the same in the past. Russian media cited the unexpected landing of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s airplane in Austria after France, Spain, Portugal and Italy presumably denied access to their airspace. Apparently, they suspected that Morales’s plane flying from Russia to Bolivia carried whistleblower Edward Snowden. But the analogy exists only in the confused minds of Russian propagandists: Morales’s plane was not a passenger flight, its pilots requested the landing in Vienna themselves and nobody produced outlandish lies about bomb threats.
The second narrative presents Pratasevich as a far-right sympathiser not worthy of western support. The Kremlin repeatedly uses this disinformation technique against its opponents. After the Putin regime failed to kill the Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny with a Novichok nerve agent, the Russian propaganda machine accused Navalny of being a nationalist.
Neither narrative is meant to convince anyone of anything, but rather to generate a pointless discussion that will emotionally drain everyone involved. Meanwhile the actual appalling hijacking becomes a secondary issue.
Arguably, Moscow tactically benefits from the Ryanair incident: Lukashenko’s deranged actions isolate Belarus even further and make it even more dependent on Russia. However, by covering up for Lukashenko’s recklessness, the Kremlin might weaken its negotiating positions ahead of the US-Russia summit in Geneva on 16th June. The west is hoping for a more predictable Russia, and while Moscow is probably interested in negotiating a price for such predictability (but not necessarily delivering in the end), having a leader as irresponsible as Lukashenko as an ally is not a strong diplomatic look.
