A Ryanair airliner flying between Athens and Vilnius was forced to make an emergency landing, escorted by Belarusian military fighters, at the airport of the capital of Belarus, Minsk, where the police immediately arrested one of its passengers: the young Belarusian opponent Roman Protasevich, former director of the independent channel Nexta, voice of dissent against Alexander Lukashenko's regime.
The journalist, in fact, who in the recent past had documented the repression of the Belarusian police on opposition demonstrators, is included in the regime's wanted list for "terrorism and extremism".
From what emerges from the first reconstructions, what happened is in fact unprecedented and looks like a grand operation of the KGB, the secret services of Minsk. Protasevich, according to Nexta, had suspected he was being followed before boarding. Then, when the aircraft was now close to the borders with Lithuania (but in Belarusian airspace), the turmoil broke out.
The Minsk airport in fact stated that the plane landed after having launched a bomb alert and that it was the pilots themselves who requested the landing. A MiG-29 fighter of the Belarusian Air Force was taken off to escort the flight to Minsk. According to a Telegram channel believed to be close to Lukashenko, the Belarusian president "in person" would have given the order to land the plane in Minsk.
The plane is then taken off again for its destination.
The leader in exile of the Belarusian opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, uttered words of fire: "The regime - she wrote on Twitter - forced the plane to land in Minsk to arrest the journalist and activist Raman Pratasevich. death penalty. The episode was harshly condemned by the presidents of the EU Parliament, David Sassoli, the Ursula von der Leyen Commission, the Charles Michel Council and the EU High Representative Josep Borrell. Berlin, from London to Rome, with the Foreign Minister, Luigi di Maio, who expressed "firm condemnation".