It’s not clear what drove Belarusian strongman Aleksandr Lukashenko to force down a Ryanair passenger jet transiting through his national airspace last month and to kidnap dissident journalist Roman Protasevich from it. But it’s clear who’s on his side in the resultant outcry: his ambivalent patron Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even as Europe has suspended flights to Belarus, Putin has kept airspace open on the eastern side of the border and threatened retaliatory action against the European Union. The codependent, if unequal, relationship between Minsk and Moscow is now set to deepen, especially after the European Union and United States introduced sweeping new sanctions today.
It first became apparent to me Lukashenko would do anything to retain power when he flew over a crowd I was standing with in a helicopter in August 2020 in Minsk. He was peering out of the doorway with rifle in hand. Lukashenko may have assumed the European Union was simply feckless and would do nothing or he may no longer have cared about the national airline, the Belarusian economy, or any outside relations bar his situational allies in Moscow. Belavia, the Belarusian national flag carrier, has now been banned from most of its neighbors’ airspace and can no longer fly into the EU. It is, in effect, a useless asset.
