Abandoning its appeasement policy in Europe, the Biden administration should join with an unusually energized European Union and swiftly impose export-focus sanctions on Belarus.
The need for action is twofold. First, to impose real costs on Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko for his shredding of a critical international norm. Second, to educate Russia that it will share in the costs of Lukashenko’s aggression.
Hijacking is the only appropriate word for what the dictator did.
On Sunday, a Ryanair flight between Greece and Lithuania was forced to divert to Minsk, Belarus, after being intercepted by a Belarusian fighter jet. The intercept came after the Belarusian KGB produced a false bomb report against the aircraft. Notably, Ryanair says that it believes a number of Belarusian KGB officers disembarked the aircraft after it landed at Minsk, failing to travel on with the other passengers to Lithuania. But the hijacking’s purpose is clear: the capture of Roman Pratasevich.
An opposition journalist and founder of the highly successful NEXTA news service, Pratasevich is a top target for Lukashenko’s ire. Since Lukashenko stole the Belarusian presidential election last August, NEXTA has been instrumental in drawing international attention to Lukashenko’s crackdown. Its coverage of protests has complicated a Russian-Belarusian desire to smash the protest movement into subjugation, instead inspiring its sustained energy. Lukashenko’s deeply personal animus toward Pratasevich should not be discounted. The dictator’s erratic behavior and public desire to present masculine strength are odd but sustaining features of his rule.
Regardless, for the West to tolerate this hijacking unchallenged would be to undermine a fundamental principle of international order. It is the principle that civilian passenger airlines be allowed to transit freely through national airspace. Failure to act would encourage authoritarian regimes everywhere to replicate this action for their own interests. This bears particular note in relation to Vladimir Putin, who now stands as de facto leader of Belarus. As British foreign secretary Dominic Raab rightly observed, this hijacking would not have occurred without Moscow’s approval (the Russian intelligence services now exercise overt control of the Belarusian KGB). If Putin senses that it is possible to intercept passenger airlines and detain his adversaries without significant cost, he will do so. Or he will have supplicant regimes like Belarus do it for him.
In turn, the United States and the EU should immediately restrict the passage of Belarusian air carriers across their airspace and into their airports. They should also go further, introducing sanctions on Belarus’s three major exports; petroleum, fertilizers, and cheese. While Russia is Belarus’s dominant export destination, accounting for nearly half of Belarus’s total export market, Ukraine, Britain, Poland, the Netherlands, and Germany are also key Belarusian export destinations. With the exception of Germany, those nations would likely support a joint sanctions endeavor.
The effect would be significant. Already heavily dependent on state financing, a significant decline in export demand would hit these industries heavily. Lukashenko and his master, Putin, would have to fill the gap with further financing. That would introduce a joint economic and political cost on the two leaders as they are forced to pay evermore to placate an already restive Belarusian population.
Threatening NATO frontier states with encirclement, Lukashenko’s puppet-for-Putin status poses a clear threat to Western security. This hijacking attests to Lukashenko’s willingness to advance that threat in ways more than geographic. But ultimately, these two leaders are acting in concert. The West’s response, then, must impose tangible costs on both of them.
