Lukashenko’s ‘lose-lose’ air caper

With this single outrageous act of diverting a recent Ryanair flight, the Belarusian president has also unwittingly vastly empowered his heretofore virtually unknown opponent.

If the flight diversion and arrest of Roman Protasevich was in fact an elaborate and diabolical plot conceived by Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, he has to be one of the dumbest dictators to ever rule a country, writes Scott Taylor. Wikimedia Commons photograph by Serge Serebro

Opinion

BY SCOTT TAYLOR

June 2, 2021

OTTAWA—On May 23, a Ryanair flight from Athens, Greece, en route 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...

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