By Scott Taylor
On Sunday May 23, a Ryanair flight from Athens, Greece enroute to Vilnius, Lithuania was diverted while in Belarus airspace and forced to land at the Minsk airport.
The Belarus authorities had claimed there was a bomb threat, which prompted them to alert the airliner’s flight crew. A Belarus Airforce Mig-29 fighter jet was also dispatched to escort the Ryanair aircraft to the Minsk airport.
Once on the ground Belarus security forces failed to find a bomb, but they did identify and arrest Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega.
Citing press freedom and global aviation laws, the U.S. led the international cries of outrage. On Thursday May 27, Canada joined in the chorus with Prime Minister Trudeau calling the incident an “attack on democracy.”
If this was in fact an elaborate and diabolical plot conceived by Lukashenko with the intention of squashing the voice of Protasevich, he has to be one of the dumbest dictators to ever rule a country.
Forcing a civilian airliner to land using a phony bomb threat and military jets was bound to grab the attention of every media outlet in the world.
Few Canadians could have located Belarus on the map before this incident, and fewer still could have named Lukashenko as the president despite the fact he has been in power for the past 27 years.
Now, we know that Lukashenko has been dubbed ‘Europe’s last dictator’ and that Belarus is one of Vladimir Putin’s few remaining allies.
However, with this single outrageous act Lukashenko has also unwittingly vastly empowered his heretofore virtually unknown opponent.
Overnight Roman Protasevich went from being an obscure blogger to having dozens of world leaders demanding his release in the name of free press.
Of course once he was thrust into the media spotlight people began to ask just who is this Roman Protasevich? Well, it turns out that he is a 26-year-old self proclaimed activist – journalist.
He began his involvement in the anti-Lukashenko opposition movement in 2011, at the age of sixteen.
Three years later he was drawn into the growing unrest in neighboring Ukraine. After participating in the Maiden protests in Kiev that eventually toppled the regime of Viktor Yanukovich, Protasevich joined the Azov Battalion.
The Azov battalion was notorious for its neo-Nazi links and was largely comprised of foreign volunteers like Protasevich.
While it is unclear exactly what role Protasevich had with Azov, the battalion’s founder Andriy Biletsky confirmed that he served with the unit. “[He] actually fought with the Azov battalion and other units against the occupation of Ukraine, but as a journalist his weapon was not the machine gun but the word,” Biletsky wrote.
Following his combat tour in Ukraine, Protasevich returned to Minsk to start a blog. After being arrested for hooliganism, Protasevich fled to Prague where he entered the employ of the U.S. funded Radio Free Europe, Belarus edition.
He subsequently co-founded a Telegram channel show called Nexta which was instrumental in helping to organize the massive anti-Lukashenko political demonstrations that followed Belarus’ August 2020 presidential elections. At the time of his arrest, Protasevich was listed as the chief editor of a blog called “Belarus of the Brain.”
So prior to this act of air privacy to seize and detain Protasevich, he was a young agitator who fought in a foreign war in a neo-Nazi unit, working for himself as a blogger.
Now, thanks to Lukashenko’s mad plan to publicly kidnap him, Protasevich is hailed by world leaders – including Trudeau – for bravely advancing the cause of free speech around the globe.
So not only did Lukashenko bring international wrath in the form of sanctions against Belarus, he simultaneously lionized a man who was previously an irritating nemesis at best, into a martyr for press freedom.
That would fall into the category of ‘lose-lose’ for Lukashenko.
