Alexander Lukashenko has accused the west of staging a “planned provocation” that he claimed forced Belarus to intercept a Ryanair flight carrying a prominent dissident at the weekend.
In his first comments since he sent a fighter jet to escort the Lithuania-bound plane to Minsk, the Belarus president told parliament he had “acted legally, protecting people according to all international laws”.
The Kremlin said there was “no reason not to trust” what Lukashenko said, but others, including Nato and Greece — where the plane first took off — disputed his account.
Speaking on Wednesday, Lukashenko defended his country’s arrest of dissident blogger Roman Protasevich, which opposition leaders and western governments said was the real reason for the forced landing, as the country’s “sovereign right”.
He claimed Minsk air traffic control had passed on a warning of a bomb threat it received from Switzerland. Belarusian officials previously said the threat came from Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has denied any involvement, via the Switzerland-based encrypted email service ProtonMail.
ProtonMail told the Financial Times: “We haven’t seen credible evidence that the claims are true, but there is plenty of evidence to support the contrary.”
Lukashenko said the Ryanair pilots had made their own decision to land the plane, en route from Athens, in Minsk, despite being much closer to its destination, the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, at the time.
The former collective farm boss, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 27 years, denied claims by Ryanair passengers that they had been held at gunpoint in Minsk and said the crew “was on the phone with someone for seven hours and didn’t want to fly out”.
He said Athens and Vilnius airports had also received the bomb threat and refused to let the plane land in Vilnius.
But Greece disputed that account. A foreign ministry spokesperson said the country “sticks to the statement made last Sunday, describing the incident as a state-sponsored hijacking”.
Lithuanian authorities declined to comment due to their ongoing criminal investigation. But Gabrielius Landsbergis, foreign minister, said: “Terrorist is what terrorist does or intends to do.”
Nato, meanwhile, described the act as “unacceptable” and said it supported calls for an urgent independent investigation.
Lukashenko also suggested critics of Belarus should have been grateful he did not order the plane to be shot down as it flew close to a nuclear power plant.
“Was Chernobyl not enough?,” he said. “If there was a bomb on board the plane and terrorists wanted to blow it up, we couldn’t really have helped. But I couldn’t let the plane fall on our people’s heads.”
Western nations have condemned the flight’s downing and called for the immediate release of Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega, who was also on the flight. The couple were detained immediately after the plane landed in Minsk, and were recorded in jail confessing to “organising mass disturbances”.
Belarus placed Protasevich and the co-founder of Nexta, the Poland-based dissident media group where the 26-year-old blogger was previously editor, on a terrorist watchlist in November.
Lukashenko implied that Nexta was being directed by western intelligence to destabilise Belarus as a testing ground for future attacks on its ally, Russia.
“I’d like to remind you that one well-known channel that started out covering Belarusian issues, but not on our land, is already working full out against Russia, thus showing the true goal of western strategists,” he said.
“Their goal is to dissolve the Belarusian people and move on to smothering their arch-enemy: the Russian.”
Additional reporting by Eleni Varvitsioti in Athens, Richard Milne in Oslo and Michael Peel in Brussels
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2021-05-26 10:42:13Z
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