Limited response to Belarus aggression

The deployment of a Belorusian fighter jet to force the grounding of a European airline stoked the imaginations of many in the continent, who fear the forceful actions of dictatorships that interfere with freedoms we take for granted.

A Ryanair plane was forced to land in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, following a bomb threat — which later proved to be false. The authorities in the Eastern European country detained journalist Roman Protasevich, who was on board the flight from Greece to Lithuania.

President Alexander Lukashenko, dubbed Europe’s ‘last dictator’ with a 27-year iron rule over his country, exercised the toothless resolve of the European Union by forcing a Ryanair flight to return to Minsk airport while still in Belorusian airspace.

The bold move comes across as an extension of Russian-style revanchism in international politics, where the consensus of diplomacy or the respect of human rights does no longer appear to have any guarantees when international actors are ready to test others’ limits.

The EU is now pressing ahead with sanctions against Belarus, but such penalties are likely to have little impact on the hardened Lukashenko. In power since 1994, he won a presidential election last year with 80.2% of the vote. The result has been contested by opposition leaders and the EU has said the vote was “neither free nor fair”. Lukashenko’s violent response to protests that followed, led the EU to implement sanctions in late 2020 against some Belarusian KGB officials, as well as on Lukashenko and his son.

The EU agreed on Monday to step up existing sanctions against Belarus and implement new economically targeted measures as well. It also agreed to ban Belarusian airlines from entering European airspace and told European airlines to avoid the Belarusian air zone.

But these measures do not pose any threat to his regime.

Belarus has long had a close relationship with Russia, and will continue to benefit from political and economic support from Russia since the last round of sanctions. Even the 2020 sanctions were, evidently, not  very painful to Lukashenko, again underlining the EU’s apparently inaction to take proper, targeted action. Belarus, despite what some might term ‘state terrorism’, is low on the list of European priorities.

Additionally, the EU is itself a state and does not have the kind of options open to states or military alliances such as NATO. Its ability to act quickly is limited when confronted by the extreme actions taken by Belarus.

But that does not diminish the impact this action has by a state on what is after all a European flight.

Other countries could seek standing to sue Belarus before the International Court of Justice (the UN court) on the basis that the global system of civil aviation was threatened by such actions. If If Protasevich was technically detained by the Belarusian authorities on the territory of Poland, as the flag state of the aircraft, then he was potentially protected by the European Convention on Human Rights, and his detention violated his right to liberty. And Poland itself could be in violation of the Convention if failing to exercise due diligence to secure their release.

Poland may have called the act of Belarus an act of “state terrorism”, but if it is serious about that, it will need to back up that call diplomatic representations to secure the release of the detainees on the basis that their detention was unlawful. The EU has to back that call and push Poland into make its national representations clear: this was after all, a Polish-flagged aircraft.

Then again, as in many instances in dealing with such countries, Belarus has consistently undermined its rule of law because the international community’s reaction is limited and slow. If the international community does not clearly demonstrate that violations of international law bear consequences, there can be no surprises when these rogue nations toy with the West by scrambling jets to chase down journalists.