Europe is a mess, and some well-applied pressure from the Biden administration could begin the process of restoring order.
A European airline flying from one European Union nation to another was intercepted by a Belarusian fighter jet, and one passenger was kidnapped for the crime of journalism. And the EU nations seem powerless to do anything about it.
The in-air, state-executed hijacking and kidnapping deserve a robust response. Europe won’t provide it on its own. President Joe Biden should make it happen.
Faking a bomb scare, Belarus launched a fighter jet to intercept and force down a flight from Greece to Lithuania. The flight was then sent to land in the Belarusian capital of Minsk. The whole thing was a ruse to kidnap independent journalist Roman Protasevich.
There’s more to this story than Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko using obscene force to silence a critic. Lukashenko wouldn’t have done this unless Vladimir Putin had first approved.
This is all a real threat to the post-World War II rules-based international order.
There are profound ramifications of this outrageous act going unpunished.
Allowing despots and dictators to use civilian airspace as fishing nets to dredge up their opponents would be disastrous. But it’s more complicated than that. After all, in a new age of air piracy, flights wouldn’t simply be delayed or forced into long reroutes. Passengers would feel pressure to self-censor in fear of inviting incarceration.
Might it be the fear of novelists who offer controversial takes on Islam? Will they feel comfortable overflying Muslim-majority nations? How about anti-corruption campaigners or journalists (including one of our writers) who have earned the Kremlin’s ire? Or perhaps it will be Chinese human rights activists who have upset Xi Jinping by calling attention to his Uyghur genocide? The sky is quite literally the limit for the risks here. But the havoc and cost that would join with a new era of dictatorial hijacking are clearly immeasurable.
There’s also the issue of what signal this hijacking would send to leaders such as Lukashenko, Putin, Xi, and Ayatollah Khamenei. Driven to advance their individual power and undermine their adversaries, these leaders have few qualms about destabilizing the international norms upon which the West invests intrinsic value.
Russia’s military incursion in Ukraine and China’s militarization of the South China Sea attest to these ambitions. In turn, if the West values international security, then we must show that perceived value in the form of our reciprocal actions. If not, our enemies will further rewrite the rules of the international game in their favor.
We should not discount Russia’s particular culpability in this situation. We are reliably informed that the Belarusian KGB intelligence service is now basically an indistinct subset of its Russian counterparts. Senior Russian intelligence officers regularly advise, direct, and support the KGB in its activities. Evincing as much, it has been suggested that passengers on board this Ryanair flight included members of the Russian security services.
As he prepares for a mid-June meeting with Putin in Geneva, Biden should pay close attention to the signal being sent here. Putin is not interested in detente, compromise, and peace. The Biden administration’s softness toward Putin, most recently waiving sanctions on Putin’s Nord Stream II energy pipeline and refusing to hold Moscow accountable for the actions of Russian hackers in disrupting the Colonial Pipeline operations, has emboldened him.
Biden must right the ship. A good place to start would be to work with European allies to make clear to Putin that unless Mr. Protasevich is released immediately, Russian flights will also be refused access to Western airspace. If Putin wants to threaten our way of life, the West, in reciprocity, must threaten his interests as well.
