The Belarus plane hijack is a small reminder why it's generally not a good idea to let governments know who is going to where. I'm not sure why governments that like to think of themselves as democratic don't see the risks.
I'd made a similar point following the assassination of Kim Jung-nam in 2017:
Travel and hospitality databases are widely accessible and shared amongst a tremendous number of organisations. State intelligence organisations might readily have access through their own state-run airline, or through private operations or plants within same. Similarly for terrorist, narco-criminal, money-laundering, or other organisations. Financial, banking, and payment-processing systems, only slightly less so. A P.I. license or position on a fraud or abuse desk at a major online retailer, or any skip-tracing agency, can have access to such information.
Note that your own threat model may not include possibilities which put others at risk.
(In fairness, it appear that Protasevich was followed onto the plane itself, suggesting that in-flight availability of manifests played little role. The question of what pre-flight intelligence methods were employed remains open.)
I don't see this happening though. It would seem reasonable to limit the countries seeing the passenger list to those countries that the plane is taking off from/leaving though.
I doubt that the pilot or copilot could have done this themselves, but I would be very surprised if they never asked their corporate control operating command to explain and establish what exactly was going on and whether they're going to be compelled to comply with the Belorussian diversions request... assuming that the escort fighter jets didn't simultaneously arrive on their wings to punctuate the "request" effectively.
Can anyone with FAA / CAA (the UK civil aviation authority) or EU airspace rules knowledge clarify what protocols exist for these situations?
The generally accepted worldwide rule is that airspace is owned by the country under it. You actually pay overflight fees for use of a countries airspace and are subject to its air traffic control. The corporate response will always be "don't get shot down."
In the US and most everywhere else, when you willfully ignore ATC they scramble fighter jets. Every pilot is trained in what this looks like and how to respond, but the safe next step is always to respond in the affirmative and land. https://www.boldmethod.com/learn-to-fly/regulations/inflight...
Note that many VFR flights are NOT under direct ATC control (though requesting flight following is always recommended) so unless you appear to be flying erratically or otherwise attract attention you may not even be noticed - it’s standard to send an interceptor if they have reason to believe your radio is inoperable and they need to get in contact (there are established intercept/no-contact procedures).
In reality it is highly unlikely for a commercial airline to ignore a direct ATC command (unless the pilot believes the plane is in distress) - and in a case like this where ATC reports a hazard onboard and divert it wouldn’t be unexpected to see an escort (even if just so that there is a witness if the plane were to actually explode).
After 9-11 the chance that the interceptors are armed is probably 100%.
Fun fact: the max speed of a normal GA plane (think Cessna) is below the stall speed of many interceptors which can result in amusement.
> Note that many VFR flights are NOT under direct ATC control
I was answering in the context of flying from one country to another while crossing over a third. You'll need a flight plan and overflight permits, which generally require ATC contact at least on entry.
Belarus specifically requires a fixed flight path using defined entry and exit points for any aircraft, a Sunday afternoon VFR wander-about is just as likely in Yemen or Iran. :)
It's been many years since I've read it, but physics professor Richard A. Muller in his book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_for_Future_Presidents argues that agricultural planes pose a great possibility of danger in relation to terrorism. They're small, nimble (meaning quite maneuverable) while holding a great amount of liquid. Gasoline is particularly suitable (911 attack were planes with tanks filled up for long distance flights for a reason) in attacks due to its high energy density.
He speaks of the farmer's community though as a tight nit community. Used planes are sold and bought within the community, farmers themselves would be very suspicious selling to someone "shady", and the FBI knows about this threat vector as well and is monitoring it closely (iirc).
So there's an example of a small plane and its potential use case in terrorism. Not sure how easily a Cessna could be rigged up to do something of that kind.
Another attack vector in the future might be small drones. Due to them not holding tons of gasoline, some form of biochemical weapon or radioactive material could be distributed.
Muller argues that the mass panic of an incident involving biochemical materials or radioactivity would most likely be a greater danger than the "material threat" itself. Many people would be scared of "radioactivity" without much understanding. People are not particularly well educated how radioactive decline works, what half life times really mean (long half life meaning slow release, less imminent danger), why various types of radioactivity can be quite different from another etc.
So don't underestimate terrorists. Luckily, don't underestimate smart people in three letter agencies thinking about this either.
>Many people would be scared of "radioactivity" without much understanding. People are not particularly well educated how radioactive decline works, what half life times really mean (long half life meaning slow release, less imminent danger), why various types of radioactivity can be quite different from another etc.
Sounds prudent of them. If a small plane spreads radioactive material over an area they are in as an act of terrorism, even a nuclear expert with 5 PhDs will first panic and try to get the fuck away and only much later care to go into the minituae of the situation.
People are not wearing masks in the face of a pandemic when experts tell them to. How well would calming down the public work (by authorities and experts) after a seemingly nuclear/biochemical terror attack and false claims from a terror organization?
The imminent reaction of "let's get out of here" in the face of danger was not what I was referring to here.
Authorities and experts want to reduce panic to make their jobs (coordination, damage assessment, policing, rescue, etc.) easier and reduce the results of masses reacting panickly.
But authorities also lie time and again and downplay threats to keep panic low (or to make themselves look better, and also because they don't know shit yet, but must still pretend that they are in control).
The sole individual might be more beneficial to panic and get the hell out (not just directly after immediate blow).
The problem is that everybody else panicking will make things difficult, cause mayhem, stampedes, block the highways, limit petrol availability, etc. But that doesn't mean it's not a good strategy at the individual level.
So there's a friction on what might be best survival strategy for each individual, leading to crappy outcomes when adopted by millions.
What I'm getting at is two subtle additions to your comment:
(a) mass panic/exodus might be a crappy response, but it can still be great at the individual level (if only if it could be kept to that). But even if not, the few succeeding in pursuing it, will probably have an advantage over others that meekisly listen to the experts/gov and "stay calm".
(b) experts often don't know whats going on for a long time, have limited input, give contradicting expert advice, and often just flat out corroborate some story to assist the government political decision about handling a crisis.
> Muller argues that the mass panic of an incident involving biochemical materials or radioactivity would most likely be a greater danger than the "material threat" itself.
I mean, this was true of a similar incident that didn't involve those factors. The United States' overreaction to 9/11 has cost several orders of magnitude more lives than were actually taken on that day.
Although I suppose things get murkier if you include copycat crimes - not too easy to copy "hijack a commercial airliner", but a whole heap of people could very easily strap a biochemical threat to a drone.
You need to put on quite a show to recreate 9/11. You need little to distribute biochemical or radioactive material, or fake distribute. Imagine a crop plane spraying some mass event. Let's even assume for the sake of argument it being simple water, before crash landing somewhere and a terrorist organization thereafter issuing a claim of responsibility and gloat about the irreversible imminent death of a million people. Would be interesting to see that play out. And yes, you would not need drones or crop planes necessarily, but it would probably instill more fear it being done that way.
The gasoline attack (liquid fuel in general) vector in relation to agricultural planes (planes used to spray crops) is real though and the relevant part to your comment. Fly it into a full football stadium with 100k people, so small planes are not to be underestimated.
> After 9-11 the chance that the interceptors are armed is probably 100%.
Why wouldn't they be? What else can they even do? Especially in the case that the radio is inoperable. Other than seeing what's happening, and reporting back.
Except you have the emergency landing possibilities which require cooperation. And after all a country has a right/obligation to know who moves trough its territory.
Imagine, it wasn't the case prior to mid-nineties.
International air travel was possible with paper tickets.
Heck, you could've travel, immigrate, and settle all around Europe without papers prior to a certain mentally challenged emperor deciding to ruin it all.
a close friend of mine who settled in the UK after he only survived the war by fluke being Polish Danzig born but with a step uncle a unfortunate gauleiter (he was on the run one way or another consequently) still to this day hurriedly produces his German Police certificate of good conduct and freedom from trouble with the law, despite being here because he spied for us he cannot be persuaded that any of the 3rd reich or subsequently 4 powers or West German authorities hold any less power over his individual freedoms and liberties and right of abode and living, not one smallest bit less in all that time. And I believe my friend is perfectly correct to think that this is the case.
> Heck, you could've travel, immigrate, and settle all around Europe without papers prior to a certain mentally challenged emperor deciding to ruin it all.
I would really like to know when exactly was that.
That does not imply that anyone "could travel, immigrate, and settle all around Europe without papers" at the same time. Wherever I look, I am finding various requirements for documentation, permission and restrictions. They might be more or less strict, but I did not succeeded in finding period where whole Europe would allowed you to move and settle freely without some of that.
And even less the part "prior to a certain mentally challenged emperor deciding to ruin it all" where I really dont know who the original person means.
You are right, but yeah, wouldn't help in this case. This guy informed people in his telegram channels where he was going, and he was followed by KGB spies in Athens airport who verified he was going onboard and even tried to make photos of his documents.
Something similar has happened with the Thai government - seizing people from transiting flights to apply Thai lese-majeste laws to foreigners who were not expecting to end up in Thailand.
the arms dealer who was the model for Nicholas Cage in The Lord of War was finally arrested in Thailand on behalf of the USA.
for some reason non Americans always seem to think that SE Asian people won't help the Feds. But as anyone American who has visited the region could tell them, SE Asia is about the last place you should try hiding from the Feds.
edit : Vietnam and the region is very friendly to Americans and even Brits who avoid alcohol (apologies I'm British born with family in both countries and actually casual drinking alcohol is probably the number one error made by British business people when travelling) but the logic behind cooperation with the USA is simply keeping the USA off their regional collective backs. Just consider how much drug trade is at risk if you upset American interests in SE Asia...
edit the 2nd : actually trying to hide anywhere where life itself is cheap is fundamentally the worst error possible to make if you are hiding from existential danger of really motivated people.
1. The arms dealer was not on a plane that got grounded. He was enjoying time in Thailand. Yes, Thailand cooperates with the US. But this is not a relevant example to the parent comment.
2. Vietnamese people drink like fish. What are you talking about?
3. Vietnam does not assist or extradite to the US AFAIK.
It's not that you should hide where life is cheap. You should hide in countries that are sworn enemies of those you are wanted in.
I'm not sure what he means, as alcohol is very accepted in Vietnam and people there drink a lot.
But (as a fellow from another region where Brits and alcohol mix) he might be talking about asshole drunk tourists behaving badly. That's a common pest everywhere young British tourists come in masses to "have a good time", and the locals don't like them much (even if some locals working in tourism make a buck off them).
Then again, the parent writes about "the number one error made by British business people when travelling" -- and business people don't fit this profile.
>The Belarus plane hijack is a small reminder why it's generally not a good idea to let governments know who is going to where. I'm not sure why governments that like to think of themselves as democratic don't see the risks
This is absolutely true. No mater what, there WILL be abuse.
It's also what worries me most about the normalization of "COVID passports". What's to stop me from putting a bounty on the owner of COVIDpass abcxyz? All you'll have to do is use an alternate scanning app and upload a video of you suckerpunching the owner of COVIDpass abcxyz to receive a 5k prize.
What does that have to do with a COVID passport?
Citizen just put a bounty on a homeless guy with no ID at all.
A COVID pass based bounty seems way more cumbersome than an old school WANTED poster.
If a government cares enough to deploy fighter jets to hijack a plane like this in violation of every international norm, you can be sure it has the resources to know where you are at all times regardless of how tightly those databases are locked down.
Your shallow dismissal not only ignores a substantial portion of my linked article concerning risks and actual case history, but even the portion quoted above.
Information is not power, information is a power multiplier. It enables actions (including attacks and defences) to be specifically focused and targeted.
In the case of Kim Jung-nam, two women (by all accounts innocent accomplices) managed to kill a significant political target in what they thought wasn an entertainment prank by splashing him with liquid, on the ground, at an airport.
Critical to the success of that attack was not access to supersonic military jet fighter aircraft, but simply knowing where and when the target would be in a specified location.
Information that's now broadcast to accuracy of centimetres and seconds on many hundreds of millions if not billions of people worldwide right now.
To give another example I've noted previously, what rights to privacy should a rhinocerous have?
Thanks, though as a caution, I'm not fully sold myself, and I'm curious about cases in which information, knowledge, storage/retrieval, transmission, or processing might be either defensive or equalisers.
Various forms of camouflage come to mind. Though the thought occurs that those can also be used by the more- and less-empowered, perhaps asymmetrically.
> If a government cares enough to deploy fighter jets [...] it has the resources to know where you are at all times
these are very different capabilities. the former is limited to state actors the latter can be found out by any Amadeus employee without any security clearance. the only way to avoid this is not to fly or use a passport that isn't in your name.
if one were to speculate it is likely not even Belarus that made this happen.
"An apparent bomb threat against two passenger flights that was tweeted today resulted in two F-16 fighter jets being scrambled to escort the two airliners.
The two flights were both enroute to Hartsfeld-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, where they landed safely NORAD said."
Wanzhou was not "pulled off her private jet"; she was detained after Canadian customs processing for something that was a crime in both the US and Canada.
Gary Botting, Canada's leading expert on extraditions disagrees with that "crime in Canada" part. Reading "Legal Commentary" section of Wikipedia's article about Wanzhou leaves the impression that Canada had decided to play poodle for whatever reasons. Trump's comment about the case and the way the US had acted in similar matter with Ericsson also leaves impression that the case is largely of political nature.
I mostly agree with you; I just don't agree it can be characterized as "pulled off her private jet" nor that the case has anything in common with diverting a commercial passenger jet via a fake bomb threat to arrest a journalist.
I did not characterize it as her being "pulled off her private jet" and never said it has any relation to a fake bomb threat. I was replying strictly to someone's point about why she was arrested at all.
Well if you're just going to ignore any context in statements, so will I. (Besides that: Fraud is a crime in both Canada and the US; the arguments presented in the Wikipedia article amount to "it's weird to extradite a specific person for this level of fraud", not that it's legal to commit fraud in Canada. I also agree with this!)
I suggest you read the whole thing carefully. "Allegation of misrepresentation" section in particular. It appears that no fraud had been committed.
"The new court filings contend that since HSBC was made aware that Huawei and Skycom were operating in Iran...".
The slides proving that were however removed from the US submission to Canada.
Further to that: "In October 2020, a judge blocked an attempt by Canada's attorney general to dismiss parts of the extradition case,[121] allowing arguments for the misrepresentation of Meng's case to move forward.[122]"
So it appears that earlier ruling in regards to fraud does not hold much water.
Just a story from the history. Plane of Bolivian president was forced to land in Viena in July 2013 in order to search for Snowden after France and Portugal forbid it flying through their air space. I strongly belive that Russian propaganda will use that incident as a leverage.
To be clear, I highly despise the Belarusian regime and I'm in full support of opposition. I could only hope that EU will do something in return but it looks like it's a standard way of handling the people politically considered to be terrorists. It's not the way it should be done neither by Belarus nor especially by US/NATO if they want to hold the peacekeepers flag. Otherwise it's just double standards and politics.
What did happen was that countries caved to US pressure to deny even the possibility of snowden passing through their airspace.
While that's absurd and a rather impolite thing to do; the moral issue there small or non-existant; denying a foreign diplomatic delegation the right to enter your territory is... perfectly OK, even when your motivations are at best dubious.
The fact that the plane even landed in Vienna at all might have been a (successful) PR stunt, since: An audio tape was subsequently released which appeared to be a recording of the flight crew requesting to land in Austria on the grounds they "could not get a correct indication" of their remaining fuel levels." - really? How convenient.
In any case it's nothing at all like the current case, except that it involved planes landing where they weren't originally headed for, due to political interference. Of course; superficial resemblances might be enough in the battlefield that is public perception.
Edit: and if you read some of the other perceptions here e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/07/03... - this all sounds like a rather convenient storm in a tea-cup. Given the convenience to Evo Morales, it all looks rather suspicious.
The United States has the implicit threat of the mightiest army in the world behind its soft spoken requests. The US doesn’t have to peacock with fighter jets because the NATO bases scattered all over Europe do the talking.
In the end both the US and Belarus grounded a plane for political reasons, and that’s what makes the situation the same in many people’s eyes. It’s just that one of those countries doesn’t have the clout to make its means look harmless and benign so had to resort to a fighter jet escort.
> The United States has the implicit threat of the mightiest army in the world behind its soft spoken requests. The US doesn’t have to peacock with fighter jets because the NATO bases scattered all over Europe do the talking.
That's a bit silly though. An implicit threat still requires the belief that an act of violence will be carried out. Do you honestly think anyone in Europe believes America will pull back the velvet glove just to find one person? It'd cause the disintegration of NATO.
Absurdly more of a threat than the US military is its economic means, backed of course by the said army. Also the underground capabilities. You don't get to anger someone who has all sorts of ways to cripple you, personally or at a national level.
The US has an unimaginable amount of soft and hard power. There's plenty of softer retaliation before carpet-bombing, which you can use (or the threat thereof) to make countries toe the line.
No, I don’t honestly think that, but I do think that the amount of military the US keeps abroad is a good proxy for how much influence they have over the area.
They did not ground the plane. France and Italy (and some less relevant countries) denied usage of their airspace (though the french sorta-kinda dispute that?), then Evo Morales's plane chose to land in Austria instead of turning back. It could have chosen to land in any number of countries, or flown back. Portugal didn't even close airspace, merely denied landing permissions for a refueling stop - and while that's not entirely reasonable, it's at least comprehensible they didn't want to get involved in the Snowden drama.
Notably, it was in Evo Morales political interest to appear to be "sticking it to the man", so undoubtedly he had no problems with making the impact appear greater than it was. Not to mention his TV interview the very day before can be read as a kind of dare to do just this. Had he really been carrying Snowden with intent to protect him, he surely would not have played this brinkmanship game in the first place, but even if he did, he did not need to land where he did.
In other words, the US got played by Evo Morales who successfully demonstrated that the US can be pretty unreasonable at times. But the US did not take his plane hostage, not even via its allies; the situation is entirely unlike the Belarusian case at hand. Seriously: is being offensive to a diplomat that's knowingly playing a game of brinkmanship somehow equivalent to abducting a civilian plane?
The Portuguese foreign ministry and the Spanish ambassador in Bolivia, ended up officially apologizing for the event
to Evo Morales. Brazilian and Portuguese newspapers references below.
(In Portuguese but online translators are pretty
good these days :-)
https://www.redebrasilatual.com.br/mundo/2013/07/portugal-pe...
Snowden may be a hero to many, but he is also legitimately accused of breaking laws in a criminal fashion.
I don't see anything wrong with interfering with the travel of fugitives from justice. Even if there are doubts about the "justice" getting applied here, just ignoring the US justice system is probably not the right way to go either.
Yes and there is also a difference between the way US justice operates and let's say Scandinavian. They do not turn their countries into prison planet where collusion between government and private enterprise encourages large scale abuse.
Even with all the problems with the US justice system, I'm pretty sure most citizens actually prefer for it to work the way it does currently, rather than not at all.
And I'd rather see Snowden face the music than defect to the Russian intelligence services. There is no way he can refuse cooperation with them. I'm not even entirely convinced that Russia had no role in his actions prior to his defection, or that he really intended to go some place else.
> most citizens actually prefer for it to work the way it does currently, rather than not at all.
This is a terrible defense for forcing down the planes of people taking political asylum. The choice is not between disrespecting asylum or not having any justice system whatsoever, and it is ridiculous to suggest so.
> And I'd rather see Snowden face the music than defect to the Russian intelligence services
Ah yes, the classic strategy of defecting to Russian intelligence services by leaving Russia to go to Bolivia.
I have not defended forcing down planes in the case of Belarus. More so in the case of the US persuing claims that other nations agree too.
Snowden said he wanted to go to Bolivia... There is no proof he actually intended to go there or that the Russians wouldn't be waiting to work with him there.
Regardless of Snowden's original intentions, he has no power to refuse cooperation with Russian intelligence services. At the very least, he has been trotted out for propaganda reasons like a trained pony. So in essence, yes, he ultimately defected by not standing trial.
> More so in the case of the US persuing claims that other nations agree too.
And other nations disagree with. Is this not the same as in the Belarusian situation?
> he has no power to refuse cooperation with Russian intelligence services
I don't think it is true that Snowden has no leverage whatsoever. Moreover, what is the evidence? What is the evidence that he is being trotted out for propaganda reasons? What is the evidence he has leaked all this information to the FSB?
It's naive to believe the FSB (or others) wouldn't use him however they wanted. Snowden has absolutely zero leverage. He can be deported to the US at any time, and Putin has proven he isn't above killing virtually anyone, no matter the public profile.
And I remember that fake Q&A session with Putin were Snowden asked a question about surveillance of their own people and Putin basically said that the Russian state would never ever do such a horrible thing. It's almost funny.
Just wanted to note that the phrase "most citizens actually prefer for it to work the way it does currently, rather than not at all" is a classical example of false dichotomy. Nobody proposed to destroy justice system in this thread, isn't it? Then why do you employ a false dichotomy?
> There is no way he can refuse cooperation with them.
There's always a way. They were already in great position just having him there.
And regarding the latter, there must be very serious investigation following Snowden's actions and if what you say is true, it's extremely hard to believe the investigation has found nothing about it. But it seems so.
If you don't propose to destroy the US justice system, you seem to have an enormous confidence in your ability to determine when exactly it should be just ignored. Maybe there are courts and legislative bodies in a democratic system, who are supposed to rule on such things?
Oh yes, sure Snowden could refuse. And the Russian intelligence services will, out of the goodness of their hearts, just stop asking.
Any connections between Russia and Snowden may have been investigated, but the results would not have been made public. That can wait until a trial, at the very least. But again, Snowden didn't stand trial, he defected to Russia...
>"That is one BS argument... most citizens actually prefer for it to work the way it does currently, rather than not at all."
That is one BS answer. Where did you see that the choice is between what the US have and "not at all".
>"And I'd rather see Snowden face the music than defect to the Russian intelligence services."
Nobody cares what you'd rather see. He did something that he believes was a right thing to do (many other people believe the same). He does not owe it to anyone to give himself up to rot the rest of his life in prison.
For some people it's indeed a better choice to "rot the rest of their life in prison" rather than defect to an enemy country, help them with their propaganda and intelligence gathering, and be at their mercy for the rest of their - probably not that long - life...
And no, for me it is no legitimate choice to selectively ignore laws if they don't suit someone. In a democracy there are well defined systems, which are of course imperfect, to adjudicate and modify those laws. Manning went through that system, and despite all the outrage at her treatment, she got out quite well. Much better than what Snowden might face if he irks Putin...
And that's the choices they make ( assuming they are in position to make it at all). I am not going to judge either.
>"she got out quite well..."
You do not know what she would do given a choice. Also she's been sentenced to 35 years. The only reason she's out is that Obama had commuted her sentence. Otherwise the life for her will be over.
So in other words, "the system" worked for Manning to some degree, right?
She wouldn't have gotten the pardon if she didn't have some legitimate claim to being a whistleblower.
Of course, a sentence of 35 years sounded ridiculous in her case, but there are legitimate ways to change those laws or ameliorate the consequences. And there is also an argument why disclosure of secrets should carry hefty prison terms, as it can result in casualties. Probably even did, in her case.
I'm not saying she is a terrible person or even that she deserved to be in prison for seven years. I'm just stating that her actions were clearly illegal and had a lot of unambigiously negative consequences. Same thing for Snowden, though he lost a lot of my sympathy by defecting to an enemy state...
May be. But once you get to know something dirty about those in power and your conscience doesn't agree to be silent, your preference doesn't matter at all, you are in trouble. Ask Snowden or Manning for details.
Both broke the law, with quite serious consequences for their country and individual soldiers. This can't just be ignored. Even if their decision may be morally justified (to some people they weren't), breaking the rules has to come with consequences.
There are issues with the US justice system, but it is a far cry from anything in Belarus or Russia. And if there is to be any secrecy around national security - most believe there should be - then there must also be consequences for breaking this secrecy, regardless of the justification.
We're in the loop here, b/c from lukashenko's (as well as putin's, btw) point of view, *exactly the same* rules applies to journalists.
Which means that either you have to review you thoughts and change them, or you are fine with killing journalists and any other dissidents (who obviously "broke the law, with quite serious consequences for their country and individual soldiers"). You just can't bet on two sides of a coin.
"And if there is to be any secrecy around national security - most believe there should be -
then there must also be consequences for breaking this secrecy, regardless of the justification. "
I believe in the necessary secrecy of some state organisations - but only if they are trustworthy and play by the rules set by the democratic institutions.
And Snowden showed that they don't do this and cannot really be trusted. And he tried the proper way to report and it did not worked.
So he became: a whistleblower
And a hunted man by the law breaking agencies whose cimes he unveiled.
So why is your conclusion, there should be only consequences for him?
That is indeed some black and white thinking! The US executive is a whole lot more trustworthy than most others. In fact, your very prosperity and freedom depends on this truth to a larger degree than you might want to admit.
And it is not clear that Snowden tried "the proper way". He says so, but he doesn't want to prove that in court. Instead he defects to an enemy state and cooperates with their intelligence services. And yes, he did defect and cooperate, the only question is what exactly he did (and still does) and how much of all of this was his intention.
The crimes Snowden committed, if any (it's not clear he could even be convicted), are absolutely legitimate. Publishing secrets you were sworn to keep secret has to be punishable. If someone decides to break those laws, out of ethical considerations, they must also face the consequences.
On the other hand, protecting whistleblowers is essential for honest, transparent government, no matter their crimes. And the US simply does not do that, not even close.
Unfortunately, the crimes Snowden revealed may well not have seen the light of day without him, which suggests we don't have enough whistleblowers. And beyond that - even the bits of PRISM, XKeyscore and whatnot that were legal are simply not authorized by a democratically elected government; you cannot claim electoral legitimacy while keeping essential parts of your program not only secret, but even publicly paying lipservice to principles in opposition to your very own secret programs. To the extent various US administrations participated in creating these programs they thus necessarily acted without a democratic mandate; after all, they lied about it in public. That's not democracy; that's conspiracy.
Had the programs been discussed at least in general terms, or the quandaries of trading which freedoms exactly for security been acknowledged by the US government, you could make the argument that the technical details must remain secret, but the principal was supported by the electorate. But as is; the whole thing - up to and including the participating judiciary - is no more legitimate than any other stolen election won by lies, propaganda, and misdirection - the kind of principles the US clearly rejects (e.g. https://www.usaid.gov/democracy/supporting-free-and-fair-ele...).
I mean: I completely agree that likely snowden is a criminal. There's little reason to assume otherwise. However, that's kind of besides the point, isn't it? Much, much more important than any one criminal is the responsibility a government, especially one that claims to uphold the ideals of democracy to actually protect its subjects as it claims to. For a sense of scale - consider the fact that governments routinely accept the legality of war, despite the fact that it's essentially akin to accepting mass murder. And I'm not trying to make the case that extreme pacificm is the way to go; but rather the opposite - if we acknowledge that even some of the most serious of crimes are potentially acceptable in the defense of proper governance, then clearly, clearly mere whistleblowing should be a no-brainer, even if that means overriding normal laws.
So the question isn't whether Snowden is criminal, it's why is he criminal? I'd say the party at fault here is the democratically elected US government, not Snowden. The law on this matter is wrong, and should be fixed.
I don't disagree that Snowden had a better justification than most for his crimes.
Manning actually faced a trial, and the system even granted her some leniency. Snowden might have found leniency too, but he probably gave that up by defecting to an enemy state.
An enemy state that routinely commits worse crimes against its citizens, than the US has even been accused of. But in Russia, protection of Whistleblowers isn't even a subject worth talking about...
> While that's absurd and a rather impolite thing to do; the moral issue there small or non-existant; denying a foreign diplomatic delegation the right to enter your territory is... perfectly OK, even when your motivations are at best dubious.
I'm glad you've declared this, I was worried that there was a moral component I had to think about.
If you contort any harder you might need to join the circus. Indeed your last sentence makes clear why you think this is no big deal (while the incident in TFA presumably is).
Yes, the fuel was a problem since they were were barred from going their intended route! They chose to land in Vienna??
Could Evo have landed in Basel? Could he have returned to Moscow?
Which airports could he have landed in?
To be clear; I'm not saying that the US pressure and European action were anything but petty. But you know; not all pettiness is equivalent to kidnapping a civilian plane.
Also, while I'm not willing to assume the best of intentions on the US's part; neither am I willing to assume them on Evo Morales's part. This grounding was in his interest - he had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. I doubt he tried to prevent the confrontation, and he may well have even taken actions to enhance the appearance of victimhood - it's always nice, playing a victim; especially if you're not actually suffering any harm.
It's almost like a number of countries suddenly refused permission to travel through their airspace, making them need exact fuel measurements rather than relying on preflight planning.
How the pressure was applied is far less relevant than the intent behind it, and the accomplished results.
The how only matters to questions of legality, not questions of morality.
Yes, or no - should airplanes in flight be forced down so that third-party countries can make political arrests? The EU seems to think that the answer to that question is 'Yes'... As long as it's done by it, not to it.
But the plane was not forced to land in the first place. It landed under some flimsy excuse about being unclear how much fuel they had. The plane could have simply flown around. It could have returned.
Planes carry only enough fuel to get to their destination, plus a little more.
If in the middle of the flight, you are told that you were surprise - banned from flying over multiple countries in your flight plan, you are forced to abort your flight and land, unless you want the plane to run out of fuel and crash in the middle of nowhere.
And again - this is a pointless semantics game. Yes or no - is messing with airplanes, in flight, in order to make political arrests acceptable behaviour? You seem to think so (As long as its done in some particular way.)
The only difference is that one of the two planes had more options for where it could land. Both had to land at somewhere other than their destination, though, unless the pilots wanted everyone on board to die.
I don't give a rat's ass if France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy can deny an in-flight commercial airplane access to their airspace to make a political arrest. They clearly can, and did. I am asking you if they should do that. Does that seem right to you?
The plane in question had enough fuel to make it across the Atlantic; it certainly had enough to make it back to Russia. If Snowden had been on board they would indisputably have done so. The choice to land in Austria was a political decision.
The Dassault Falcon 900EX doesn't have enough range to get from Moscow to Bolivia. It might've had enough fuel to get across the Atlantic, but only if they were planning on refueling in the US or Canada after making a large deviation from the direct route. I think it's most likely they were planning on making a fuel stop somewhere in the old world and were carrying an amount of fuel commensurate with that.
edit: Yep, according to Portugal they initially requested a fuel stop in Lisbon before they were grounded. When they ultimately left Vienna they refueled at the Canary Islands.
Even Lisbon to La Paz is pushing it at 8670km. Their plane doesn't have winglets, so its range is max 8300km. Not sure if that's fully loaded or best-case scenario. Good thing they went to the Canary Islands.
A more plausible Portuguese refueling stop could have been the azores, those are sort of close to half-way between moscow and la paz, and both legs of that journey are well within the 900EX's range.
> The plane in question had enough fuel to make it across the Atlantic
Maybe to Canada or USA, but their presence over Austria was already inoptimal for that. I suspect they were planning on a european tech stop anyway.
The long range Dassault version with the extra winglet option can do 8800km. Moscow to La Paz is 12500. A stop in Lisbon would just barely let them make it direct to Bolivia. Otherwise they'd have to stop in Gander or NYC. Definitely not Miami.
What was their flight plan? I can guess why it was necessary to interrupt them while over landlocked Europe if they really wanted to search the plane. If you let them get to Portugal or Spain and then denied them landing/passage, they could always exit to Africa.
>it certainly had enough to make it back to Russia.
We can never really know if they legally could because we don't know if they would receive transit approval back over Austria's neighbours or just remain trapped in an obviously coordinated program to deny passage.
He may well have been heading to the Azores, which are in range to both La Paz and Moscow, and would explain the bits of the story about the Portuguese denying a refueling stop.
If Evo Morales wanted to fly back to Moscow, they would have requested clearance to return, and that would have been part of the scandal. He did not ask. Also, don't forget that being victimized by imperialist forces is pretty much exactly what Evo Morales wanted; it supports his political persona perfectly. And indeed, he used the incident to his political advantage. Incidentally: just because it's plausible this was a set up by Evo Morales doesn't diminish the impropriety of denying overflight; but it does mean I'm skeptical of all the speculation beyond that; it's just too convenient. Frankly, it's rather convenient that apparently American intelligence agencies thought Snowden was on the plane in the first place - and given Morales statements beforehand on national Russian TV, it's at least conceivable even that was an intentional misdirection.
I mean, make no mistake - the hounding of Snowden for exposing US hypocrisy is a travesty; and the lengths to which the US was willing to go to recapture him too. But just because the US actions were the opposite of noble does not somehow mean Evo Morales was entirely on the level.
What the pilot chose to do in the situation has no bearing on what France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain did, and whether they should have done it.
I will ask again - do you think it is appropriate for countries to disrupt third party, commercial air travel, in order to force travelers down into a jurisdiction where they can make political arrests? It's a very simple, yes, or no question.
Morales’ plane was not forced down, and there was no chance of a political arrest actually happening (because the plane would not have landed if Snowden had been on board). Moreover, the European countries would have known in advance that their actions would not force the plane down or create the possibility of an arrest. So your simple question is not relevant to the situation.
You are still avoiding the question, while misinterpreting my point. I'm not saying that the two situations are 100% identical in what happened. I am, however, saying, that the two situations are 100% identical in intent.
So, again - yes or no - is it appropriate to disrupt a third party flight, in order to make a political arrest of a passenger on that flight? We've been dodging this question for the better part of a day, but nobody seems to be willing to stand up and say "Yes, it damn well is." Instead, everyone seems to be splitting hairs about the definition of 'disrupt'. I don't care about your definition of disrupt. [1] Is it, or is it not the sort of thing that we do?
Is the intent behind this the kind of intent that you're going to sanction? Or the kind of intent that you're going to condemn?
> (because the plane would not have landed if Snowden had been on board)
Unsubstantiated speculation, and completely irrelevant. You have no idea what the pilot would have done if he were.
> Moreover, the European countries would have known in advance that their actions would not force the plane down or create the possibility of an arrest
Also unsubstantiated speculation, and completely irrelevant. You have no idea what the people who made that call were thinking. Your interpretation also fails to account for why four countries did just that. For shits and giggles? Because they were expecting that stunt to fail? Because someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and decided to play airspace roulette?
[1] Further up in the thread, people keep saying that the plane was closer to Vilnius than Minsk, as if that is at all relevant. Were it closer to Minsk than Vilnius at the time of the call, would that have made this entire affair kosher for you? You seem to be incredibly concerned about the form, as opposed to the intent.
> I am, however, saying, that the two situations are 100% identical in intent.
Why does it matter that the intent is the same? Victim of a crime obviously intends to punish the criminal, but there is much difference between taking the matter in one's own hands and relying on the justice system. Can't you see the difference?
> So, again - yes or no - is it appropriate to disrupt a third party flight, in order to make a political arrest of a passenger on that flight?
You accused the GP of speculation, yet you're doing exactly that here. How do you know that Morales incident was to capture Snowden? It could have been just a political message to deter those who were thinking of harboring Snowden, especially if they weren't sure he was onboard. They weren't forced to land in Vienna. The plane could have come back to Russia. Perhaps they did what they did for their own PR game.
Sure there are differences - in one case it was us (and we are good guys of course) and in another case it was them (and they are bad guys). Nothing new under the sun, it has always been like that, us vs them.
In Snowden case the plan weren't forced to land and was free to pick a different path. Ryanair's flight didn't have a choice. Belarus ignored all the convention and put passengers in danger. Not a big difference?
Passengers were in danger in a same way passengers are in danger over New York if pilot refuses ATC directions.
Yeah, Morales's pilot could choose a different path provided there's air refueling available. Otherwise it had to land somewhere, and then airplane was searched. I'm pretty sure there are conventions that forbid that kind behavior against diplomatic personal.
So, in the end, we are again at the same place - when we ignore conventions that's perfectly fine, and when they do the same it's a completely different.
btw read first article of Chicago convention, then check what sovereignty means.
According to Morales, no Viennese authorities boarded to plane, and in any case it's a bit of a moot point - after all Morales may well have cooperated well beyond what was required; after all, he had no reason to prevent transparency here, and indeed it's a PR win for his anti-imperialist cause if he can demonstrate the US and its allies are essentially bullies.
Assuming he intended to fly to the azores to refuel, he should have had enough fuel to fly back to Moscow too. The austrian air traffic control did not induce him to land; he chose to do so when portugal refused refueling rights and a small number of countries did not immediate grant permission to fly over their territory (but according to France, once it became clear it was Morales's plane they did, so... somebody is being economical with the truth there).
In any case, even without air refueling it would have been extremely unlikely that the 900EX only had enough fuel for the around 3000km to Vienna as opposed to the 8000km it could carry when the overall trip is around 15000km. Almost certainly Morales had his pick of airports to land at, including Moscow, Basel, perhaps Turkey or Egypt or who knows where.
There is clear evidence Morales' plane could not follow its original flight plan nor fly without any refueling all the way to La Paz; but there is no evidence he couldn't have chosen to avoid landing in the EU if he had wanted to. But... he didn't want to avoid that; he wanted to make the point that the US is imperialist.
And that's fine! I don't begrudge him that. But it's just an entirely different story to the Belarusian abduction of a journalist by temporarily kidnapping an entire civilian plane. Those aren't at all the same, and claims in this discussion thread to the contrary seem like strained attempts at whataboutism; presenting the US government as not just having its own flaws, but having equivalent flaws to Belarusian dictatorships' flaws. At that point, it seems like people are living in some kind of alternate reality they've imagined to suit their predetermined world view.
It surely was forced to land... somewhere. However, this plane is capable of crossing the Atlantic, and surely wasn't going to make unnecessary refueling stops. And indeed, they didn't make the implausible claim that they'd run out of fuel; they made the only slightly less implausible claim that they weren't sure of the fuel situation. And several European countries dispute the chain of events. The plane in question was a dassault falcon 900ex - https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/fab-001 - that has a range of 8,340km; it would have needed only 1 refueling stop between moscow and la paz. The fact that portugal refused a refueling stop is perhaps relevant, because that stop may well have been planned for the azores - those are slightly further from Vienna than Moscow is; making the story about fuel yet more implausible.
Finally, consider the motivations of its owner - Evo Morales. While I have no objection to his political aims; it is nevertheless wise to consider that he does have political aims. And as it so happens, he's a populist, anti-imperialist, anti-US political leader. For him, seeking this confrontation would have been a pure win; and furthermore being seen as the victim of imperialist oppression would have been the cherry on top. As such, it's just not reasonable to assume that his actions were aimed to defuse the situation; if he could appear to be victimized by imperialist forces, that's to his benefit.
So it's entirely plausible for him to choose to land in Vienna instead of return. It's not very plausible fuel was running low. Additionally, there are about a dozen other countries very close by he could like have chosen to land in, even if fuel was scarce - he wasn't in some inescapable box.
But that's the key difference between west and Russians. One wouldn't blink an eye to kill one of their own people to advance, while other tries to protect their citizens at almost any cost...
You're getting downvoted but the producer of the show "24" has stated that it was a "patriotic" show and it's at least in part responsible for the acceptance in the American public opinion of the torture inflicted upon terrorism suspects post-9/11. TV/movies are not mere entertainment, they often carry a message.
It's an open secret that US military influences movies to whitewash themselves. The message is that regardless of some dark pages of history, military and CIA are fundamentally the Good Guys(tm)
We'll see, but perhaps there was some Russian involvement.
Now that the plane has arrived at the intended destination (Vilnius), it was missing two Belarusian citizens (Protasevich, and presumably his girlfriend who was on the flight has also been arrested) and four Russian citizens. There are some rumors that those four people were trailing Protasevich before the flight and were involved in the 'bomb threat', so it might as well have been a common Belarussion-Russian operation, but as of now it's all just guesses and speculation, perhaps tomorrow we'll have better info.
Belarus can't be closer to Russia than it is already - they effectively don't have a border between them. Belarus is a definition of a satellite state.
That's not quite true. Their relations have had multiple ups and downs. Besides, Belarus having burnt other bridges always offers Moscow extra leverage.
Russia, through Putin, and Belarus, through Lukashenka, are very closely allied. Highlighted in the NYTimes coverage:
It underscored that with the support of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Lukashenko is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to repress dissent....
In Russia — where the state media described last year’s uprising against Mr. Lukashenko as a Western plot — the arrest met with approval among Mr. Putin’s supporters. Margarita Simonyan, editor of the pro-Kremlin RT television network, wrote on Twitter that Mr. Lukashenko “played it beautifully.” And Vyacheslav Lysakov, a member of Parliament allied with Mr. Putin, described Mr. Protasevich’s arrest as a “brilliant special operation.”
To clarify the implications for Western readers who don't know how 'Eastern' state media works - it would be expected that media like RT/Simonyan would comment only the "proper" opinion and so on sensitive geopolitical issues the news agency can express a strong opinion only when Kremlin has decided on what the proper opinion is, they don't have the authority to decide on their own, the foreign ministry decides the proper message.
In earlier cases with genuinely surprising events they have refrained from commenting for sometimes quite a long time. The fact that they congratulate Lukashenka so quickly suggests that they were able to get a rapid confirmation from officials that this should be promoted instead of condemned, and it suggests that more likely than not this wasn't a surprise for Kremlin, that they were informed beforehand or perhaps even participated in making that "brilliant special operation" happen.
Closing an airspace is letting people know they can’t fly there. It is hostile but really not the same level as an ambush and kidnapping. Had Belarus just closed their air space, the aircraft would simply have flown elsewhere and the journalist would still be free.
Well they were in Belarusian airspace. Can they close their airspace in a specially shaped path straight to Minsk where any deviation would be an infringement on their airspace closure?
You can "trap" planes by closing airspace all around them? That is effectively what occurred for the Morales flight. I don't think it is effectively distinguishable.
I mean, Snowden actually ran off with state secrets and wasn't being targeted by a authoritarian like Putin or Lukashenko. He was being pursued for breakingbreaking laws NOT meant to protect the authoritarian, but to protect the rule of law as passed by its representative government.
If you want to argue that there is no difference between an authoritarian state like Belarusa and Russia and the United States in the way they pursue and prosecute those that threaten the state, then go for it, but I'm not buying it.
Sounds like a Catch-22 to me: if any action done by the US cannot be considered authoritarian because the US is not an authoritarian state, then the US can never be considered an authoritarian state even when it acts like one.
I went to the DDR museum in Berlin today. Part of their display is a whole exhibit devoted to how the Stasi monitored the lives of ordinary East Germans.
Honestly, it was kinda laughable. It was so primitive compared to what the 5 eyes routinely do to their own citizens with the aid of social media. Really, they tapped the phone lines but if you said "we shouldn't talk on the phone" that wasn't an admission of guilt or an indication that they should follow you.
And the normal accusation was "mental illness" if you started behaving in ways that the regime didn't approve of. Glenn Greenwald's latest piece [0] on his struggles with corporate media rang the same bell: "Depicting critics of liberal orthodoxies as mentally ill, rage-driven bullies, and shadows of their former selves, is a long-time tactic of guardians of establishment liberalism to expel dissidents from their in-group circles." Replace liberalism with authoritarian socialism and same same.
I was struck by how far we've gone towards something that even the East Germans considered untenable and intrusive.
If you try to leave the US, no US official will stop you. If you tried to leave the DDR, you got shot. Or mauled by dogs. Or blown up by the minefield.
Watch the movie balloon to get a feeling how it was to live there. Not the same, at all.
> If you try to leave the US, no US official will stop you.
That is not actually true, and I am saying this as a dual citizen who is culturally American. Under 8 USC section 1185(b) it is unlawful for any Untied States Citizen to depart from or enter or attempt to depart from or enter the United States without a United States Passport. So you need an US passport to leave or enter the US even though you do not show immigration agents your passport when leaving the US. When you return you will need your US passport to be admitted.
While it is true that there is no "passport control" on exit in the US (while there is in Europe), it could be easily implemented and scaled into action by a simple law passing Congress.
If passport control were to come into existence (whether by Congress or presidential executive order), and you can only leave on an American passport as an American citizen in America, then you can very easily be barred from leaving with a passport.
You can stop using social media or use some specific social media with zero monitoring by state (mastodon?), but it was almost impossible to escape from DDR.
And you can't compare liberalism with real threat to your life from being tortured in soviet psychiatric hospitals. In fact to have almost zero chance to get such treatment even if you'll post thousands of posts like this about liberalism per day.
Apples and oranges. Snowden was an internationally (or most nations) wanted man, and had trouble moving. He knew he was targeted and any plane he'd use will be targeted.
On the other hand, this hijacking probably took everyone off-guard. They also didn't divert the plane because of a wanted individual but they made up a fake reason. This is piracy/hijacking plain and simple.
Protasevich, as far as I heard, openly called for actions which would be considered criminal in any western state (of course you don't hear about that from your "free press)". For this purpose he was possibly in contact with the western "secret services".
I wonder how the west would act in a similar situation. Remember, Smowden WAS NOT in any kind of contact with Russia, and did not call neither to unlawful actions neither to violence against politicians. Still the plane of Morales was forced to land, and if Snowden waas there, he would get a treatment probably worse than that of Bradley Manning.
But above all, I don't understand why you think you have any right whatsoever to tell others which governments are good or bad for them.
And to all those who tell "we must react", ask yourself if you are prepared to die for "democracy in Belorussia". Because this is where it might end if you don't uderstand that the only place you do have the right to choose the government for is your "land of the free". So called , that is.
> ask yourself if you are prepared to die for "democracy in Belorussia"
You should be very careful making statements like this. The United States jumped into two world wars that were thousands of miles away from its shores - and those were in periods of history when "isolationism" was considered a popular virtue.
Generally speaking, Americans are judgmental, moralistic, and bloodthisrty. This can be a force for good and/or evil.
This is very bold move. They want his network, that's why this young man is so valuable. I hope the international community will act quickly, that his contacts know what they are doing and are prepared for this situation. Because he's facing torture, and the fact his girlfriend was arrested with him will make things worse. I don't know what to do
There's nothing effective that's going to be done about this.
Regimes like that change only when forced by violence or credible threats of violence in their territory - actual power, not "soft power", it will change only because of large quantities of people in Belarus/Minsk actually make the change happen (as opposed to just asking for change). Looking around, who might make such a change?
1. Western countries definitely won't do that in Belarus, a boots-on-the-ground invasion like that seems totally implausible and would risk escalation into a military conflict with Russia, it's just not going to happen;
2. The Belarus opposition decided to explicitly avoid trying anything and limit their activities to nonviolent protests - last year there were some moments where perhaps they had a chance to overthrow the regime if they tried, but now the regime has succeeded in repressing the opposition (partly through acts like in this article), they can't rally masses as much anymore, so no chances in the short term;
3. Russia has no need to do that, they seem to be satisfied with the current direction and whatever deals they made;
4. Internally, the regime seems stable. Last year perhaps there were some questions on whether all structures of power would support Lukashenka, but that seems to be over for now - but IMHO this is the only thing that can change the country's direction, if the regime stays unified, Lukashenka will get away with all of this (and, most likely, escalate it) for a decade or more easily, the existing regime is stuck and can't change (since as soon as they loosen the grip, they'll end up like Gaddafi), but if a "court coup" happens, they might change the direction.
So all that's on the table is complaining loudly and sanctions that aren't going to be effective in the short term. I mean, the only way how sanctions can work is if they make the economic situation dire enough so that Belarus people actually do revolt, until that, the regime will make sure that the siloviki get their share of the dwindling funds and it won't change their behavior as that behavior is now required for their self-preservation.
Making an example out of this could well be cheaper than confronting Moscow in the long run. I’m not advocating it. Just saying this wasn’t a risk-free entourage. Levelling a few military air bases while communicating to Russia exactly what’s being done will piss everyone off, but it’s unlikely to escalate. It is also unlikely to spiral.
Lukashenko and Putin would love that. No one would longer doubt it when they say that opposition is backed by NATO. As for the spiral, well, Ukraine would probably lose some of its military bases, just because it's apparently no big deal now.
I think as a rule, we should use epistemic humility and look to past instances of intervention unless we have really strong reasons to believe that this would be a uniquely successful intervention.
> Western countries definitely won't do that in Belarus, a boots-on-the-ground invasion like that seems totally implausible and would risk escalation into a military conflict with Russia, it's just not going to happen
I don't disagree with your conclusion, but I just don't understand why so many trillions of dollars around the world are being spent on military power that just sits by and watches dictatorships kidnap protestors from other countries and execute them.
Having grown up in the early 2000s and seen some offensively transparent excuses to start military invasions, surely this is a far more justifiable reason for conflict. Is everyone just waiting for Lukashenko and Putin to die and hoping that their successors won't be as maniacal?
> I just don't understand why so many trillions of dollars around the world are being spent on military power that just sits by and watches dictatorships kidnap protestors from other countries and execute them.
We make wars to control energy sources, trade routes, etc. The west as happily puts a dictator in place of a democratic government when it's in their interest (or the best interest of the men in power and their supports).
You also need to have an opposition figure who you can tell is likely to succeed with your assistance ahead of time, and who can make credible promises to pay you back (ie. with contracts for the rebuilding, contracts on oil extraction, etc.)
It's very clear how this played out in Libya, for instance, if you read the leaked Hillary Clinton emails. [0]
> Having grown up in the early 2000s and seen some offensively transparent excuses to start military invasions, surely this is a far more justifiable reason for conflict
If you were around during that time, you should know that for most people, the justifications being bandied around were much less "offensively transparent" at the time. Just look at public opinion, headlines, etc. - opposition to intervention was a massive minority opinion. Most people believed about the WMDs, etc.
Now, opinion has shifted quite substantially - so why is it surprising that people are skeptical of intervention?
Personally, as a citizen of the US, I would fight tooth & nail against any deployment of troops over this. In no way am I confident fewer people would die or be harmed with intervention.
I don't know what to make of your post. You have "seen some offensively transparent excuses to start military invasions" and yet keep asking these naive questions.
A plane was travelling between two countries. The head of state of a third country gave the direct order to hijack said plane in order to murder someone onboard.
I can't see how you'd interpret that as anything except an act of war. That doesn't seem like an offensively transparent excuse to me. Certainly in comparison to "My fortune cookie said they might have WMDs" or whatever the line was two decades ago that was apparently good enough for the US.
I'd say "what does it take, a literal invasion?" but that already happened in Crimea.
> Western countries definitely won't do that in Belarus, a boots-on-the-ground invasion like that seems totally implausible
Why so?
NATO completely towers over Belorus army. It has only a single airbase — Minsk, and all its air defence for this city only.
More importantly, it's military is critically short of skilled manpower, just like is Russian army (having more vehicles than pilots for them.)
Belarus triggering a defence treaty with Russia? Pffff, he can trigger it upon his own head, as did Armenia.
Russia will not come when faced with credible force.
> but now the regime has succeeded in repressing the opposition (partly through acts like in this article), they can't rally masses as much anymore, so no chances in the short term;
Any government in the world can be overthrown by a popular revolt. Any.
If you think about things seriously, and reject useless sentimentalism, using power starts make sense.
A very obvious benefit of doing so, is that it is the quickest, and easiest way to discredit defeatist voices.
I'm not talking about the ability, I'm talking about the will to spill your soldiers blood for such a purpose. A boots-on-the-ground invasion is off the table because western countries would consider that price far, far too high for such a goal. I mean, muster a large scale invasion, for what? A couple dead journalists? Looking at other potential interventions, even literal mass concentration camps would probably be tolerated without escalating to an invasion. No, the western political will in this case is definitely limited to sanctions only. They might perhaps assist one side in a local conflict (i.e. the locals provide "boots on the grounds" and any blood to be spilled, while outsiders provide money and arms), this has happened in quite some places, but in Belarus there isn't an ongoing violent conflict between two sides, there's just the state applying small scale police action against individuals, there aren't any "rebel organizations" that would be capable of receiving such support.
> Belarus triggering a defence treaty with Russia?
We'd expect Russia to come in with force to prevent a pro-western government forming, treaty or not - e.g. if it seemed that Lukashenka would agree to cede power to a pro-western opposition, I wouldn't be surprised at an intervention from Russia even if Lukashenka would object. Once again, such scenarios were discussed and considered credible last year, but weren't "tested" as it turned out differently.
> Russia will not come when faced with credible force.
Perhaps, but there isn't a credible will to apply force, so any threats of such force would be treated by Russia as obvious bluffs.
> Any government in the world can be overthrown by a popular revolt. Any.
Of course, but a popular revolt isn't happening in Belarus, the opposition chose (and are still choosing) not to revolt and limit their activities to nonviolent protest - if you'd call that defeatist, I might agree, but that was the initial position and they seem to have succeeded in spreading that doctrine, and it would take time to reverse it. And the lack of practical reaction of people to the state abuse of power and the failure of various attempts at general strikes indicates that the conditions aren't even close to a revolt.
A few days before this hijacking occurred, I was wishing that I knew Russian better, because I knew that I was going to be missing out on the guaranteed show that was going to occur this summer. Yeah, nobody is going to do an invasion over a couple of journalists getting killed. However, one should be concerned about the Belarusians that might not align themselves with Russia, when things go down. Those people easily could be persecuted and thrown into concentration camps.
Because Russia. And you're right, just back in January an angry mob of traitors invaded the US Capitol building and were looking to install a dictator and kill Congress people and the VP. It can happen anywhere, we're just lucky they were buffoons.
But when I called US being few years away from the second civil war here 4 years ago, people weren't very kind. Half laughed me out, and another half got me banned.
Maybe, sometimes, people have to be told not to take serious political matters of national importance so dismissively.
As for Yerevan - they were almost ready to throw him our of the office when they finally realised they have been lied about their military state and success.
In fact I think the only way to remove Lugabe at this point is to remove Putin first, but since this is not happening before second cold war, my only advice for compatriots fortunate enough is to leave
This is exactly the argument propaganda in Russia and Belarus brings forward again and again — that it’s bystanders and outsiders that attempt to shame people into violence and grave risk to their lives.
Historically, majority of popular armed revolts were followed by bloodbaths, and years of economic dismay. Falling of Eastern bloc was a major exception, because USSR, the primary sponsor, crumbled itself. And even then there was Yugoslavia.
Dying in the name of freedom is just too much to ask of a normal person. Moving and freeing yourself is a more pragmatic move. Its not that hard to uphold your ethnic identity outside of arbitrarily defined borders, anyway.
Foreign invasion, on the other hand, has a much higher potential to galvanise all sorts of radicalists, as it has done every single time, everywhere.
So, please, be mindful of your call to arms to people in the faraway lands.
Didn't Belarus have mass conscription? IMHO a large portion of Belarus men should have proper training to handle a weapon and squad/platoon tactics from their mandatory army year (or year-and-a-half). They don't have a lot of weapons, though.
But if most of them were willing to do that, then the same motivation would apply for the conscripts who currently make up the army and do have all the weapons required, so that would be the scenario of "internal coup" with army turning against Lukashenka; but we as far as we see, neither the army nor the general population are currently eager for violent action, so things would have to get much worse before they might reconsider.
Good point. They no doubt learned a lot about torture during the Cold War years and from some of the best. It's really a shame that countries are allowed to do this and it would seem like there would be some international agreement against it.
The international community will do exactly NOTHING, as always. Hundreds of people have been tortured in Belarus by a crazy dictator, and nobody actually gives a shit. The only thing they can do is to say how “worrying this situation is”. Leaders without the balls. Maniacs like Lukashenko and Putin will do whatever they want while the only reaction is talking.
> international community will do exactly NOTHING, as always. Hundreds of people have been tortured in Belarus by a crazy dictator
There is a huge difference between diverting an international flight and terrorising one’s own citizens. The latter is a humanitarian crisis. The former is a threat to me and my family. That’s a material difference.
At the very least, Belarusian air space and air access rights should be curtailed. It would also be reasonable to scramble NATO assets to protect those airways.
Russia would not permit NATO to control Belarusian air space. Despite some recent strained relations, Russia would see such a move against Belarus as a move against Russia. The western world's love of "no fly zones" only works with the weakest of opponents that have few friends. This isn't Iraq or Libya, this is Russia's front porch. This type of saber rattling is the type that starts act hot wars.
> Russia would not permit NATO to control Belarusian air space
Nobody proposed NATO air dominance over Belarus. What I proposed is restricting international flights through Belarusian ATZ, denying Belarusian flights international overfly, escorting international flights that get close to Belarus with armed NATO platforms and denying neighbouring airspace to Belarusian armed platforms.
Russia is becoming increasingly irrelevant and powerless. The economy is tiny for it's size and Europe has been reducing its dependence on Russian natural gas.
That also makes me worried, because they're a nuclear nation and when someone is cornered or has nothing left to lose they can become seriously dangerous.
They're waiting for climate change to kick in in earnest and free the northern passage. Then I guess they can act like rentiers and charge shipping for using it.
Other than that as long as Putin stays in power nothing will ever change. Maybe the next czar will be more progressive. Who knows.
Is there anyone willing to try them? I don't think so. We will see some new sanctions and that's all. There were strong words about Russian occupation of Crimea - who really cares about it now? There will be some sanctions and we will forget about this act of terrorism in few weeks, unless they decide to kill that poor guy, maybe then we will see some additional sanctions. And honestly I have no idea what more could anyone do within current geopolitical landscape.
Ryan Air should stop all flights in and out of Belarus until this guy is released and go somewhere where he is free. Then some other companies could follow their lead.
What do you want them to do? Do you think people anywhere are willing to go to ( potentially nuclear ) war over Belarus? And even if there's a war, ans the "good guys" win, how does that guarantee that things will be better than before, and won't devolve into chaos and civil war, like they did in Iraq or Lybia?
I want them to freeze bank accounts and immovables of the Belarusian establishment, including the most powerful elites.
Look at Putin - doesn't matter what he does, his retinue does what they want. They are enjoying super-yachts, parking them without any issues in European ports, their kids are still “almost gods” and do whatever they want.
The western world gratefully takes the money from dictatorship regimes, and they don't give a shit where money comes from.
While it happens, dictators will not stop. As soon as dictators lose their establishment support, they’ll be overthrown.
All of the “sanctions” are so ridiculous, that it looks like these sanctions were made to calm down the own citizens, not to stop this devastating money flow.
Yeah basically those wars have shown that unless the locals want democracy and you are willing to suppress all rebellion with an iron fist (like USA in Japan) then as soon as you leave, if you even win, it will go back to the way it was before just under a new dictator. It just seems like some societies just don't care if they're run by a dictator. Sure some will rise up but it's usually no more than a few percent.
1945 is probably a good counterexample. If Hitler had kept his regime and genocide locally and not invaded neighbours, there would be no WW2, everybody would let him do that.
Just like in Cambodia, or Rwanda, or North Korea, or many, many other examples - as a rule, the world does not intervene with violent regime change just because a regime is abusing their people. Like, nobody in power batted an eye when Saddam gassed Kurds in his territory, intervention happened only when he invaded Kuwait. I'm not even sure if I have seen a single exception in 20th-21st century history; it feels like humanitarian aspects have been only used as a pretext or justification if there were other politic/economic reasons that mattered more than that.
What about Libya, Syria, etc? IMHO none of these are examples where the world intervened with violent regime change just because a regime was abusing their people.
Libya 2011 was a civil war/revolution, the "boots on the ground" were locals, western nations weren't willing to risk their own soldiers in an actual intervention and it's highly debatable whether the civilian abuse was ever a reason for the western support (aerial and otherwise), IMHO it was essentially about oil.
Syria is again a good counterexample - Assad's totalitarian suppression of human rights and torture of opposition was notorious and one of the triggers for the uprising in 2011, but noone considered an intervention before 2011 or at that time for these reasons - Assad's regime is a clear demonstration that no, the world is not going to intervene just because your police is e.g. literally pulling fingernails off highschoolers who have been reported as criticizing the regime. The west was ready to intervene only a few years later in 2014, when the civil war had already raged for years and again it seems to have been done for entirely different reasons e.g. Islamic State, geopolitical tug-of-war with Russia and, again, oil - those things matter for likelihood of intervention, unlike just abusing your civilians.
Afghanistan and Vietnam are obviously irrelevant, IMHO noone is seriously asserting that preventing regime atrocities against their own people was the main driver for these wars, other reasons were clearly dominant there.
So in my view all those are just examples that the world is not going to do anything serious just because a dictator is murdering or torturing internal opposition. They may invade for various other reasons, and they may opportunistically support one side or the other once some conflict or revolt is already happening (war doesn't seem as horrible if it's all done by someone else's people fighting and suffering), but as long as the totalitarian state is in control, nobody is going to come and bust the oppressed out of their prisons just to help them.
Boots on the ground is an incredibly narrow interpretation of what constitutes intervention, especially with modern warfare tactics that rely on local organizing, arms supply, air support and very few actual boots on the ground. If your original comment had been "rarely does the int'l community put boots on the ground for solely humanitarian reasons", I think it would have been more defensible.
I don't think the evidence is there to support that Libya was "essentially about oil." There is evidence for that possibly being a major motivation for France, but that was only one of multiple large players in the intervention. Libya was invaded with UN security council authorization pretty explicitly focused on humanitarian concerns.
Your timeline on Syria is wrong. Sure, much more extensive intervention began against ISIL in 2014, but there was support for early rebel forces in Syria starting in 2012.
I'll trust the friend I have from Belarus, along with videos and reporting I've seen from Minsk, that this was in fact a wannabe dictator kidnapping his political opponent by forcing down an international flight.
.. so unless you think that I must not be allowed to express my opinion, because the only Russians allowed to express their opinions here would be Navalnyi followers and the like, bear with me.
Well, if you support a gangster wannabe KGB agent like Putin, you're certainly in the wrong. But go ahead and express yourself. Welcome to American free expression.
What about forcing the plane of the Bolivian president to land in 2013; what that justified? Lukashenko is doing what "international community" did then -- trying to catch an inconvenient person that the state cannot legally reach otherwise.
I am not claiming that such things should be left with no response. In fact, I suspect this might hasten Lukashenko's downfall (quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi), but he is just taking a page from the "western civilization" playbook. My 2c.
If we're trying to set up international norms, it kinda seems relevant to what those norms are. Are we distinguishing between those two events or are they equally illegal? What should the punishment be?
Very accurate description IMO. I hope no EU company flies over Belarus after that. In retrospect this is an unacceptable risk.
PS: Which also brings to mind the downed Malaysian flight when flying over Russian-friendly Ukraine. I hope that airlines also have these areas in their no-fly lists.
I would think launching fighter jets to force the landing of a passenger plane is considered an act of aggression. How will that play out with NATO, of which the origin/destination countries are a part of?
In emergency situations it is totally normal to send fighter jets, less so as killing machines, more as agile planes with pilots skilled at close-quarter flying. The fighter pilots can assess the situation, guide the pilot (perhaps with a broken radio or other trouble?) down to safety. Or if it is hijacked and aimed at a nuclear plant, probably then shoot it down. This happens everywhere.
Of course this is a very convenient coincidence here that a random emergency happens with a wanted man in board...
Not really a NATO issue, if you willingly enter another country, even it's airspace, you're agreeing to abide by their laws. Or, this this case, lack of laws. There's lots of things wrong with this, but NATO rules aren't in play.
Considering that most if not all Europe to Asia flights go over Russia, it will be awfully long escorts and Russia will 10x cost too. Besides that Russia has nothing to do with current incident.
Of course they do, Belarus is in their pocket and they have to pay accordingly. NATO cannot display weakness again and again. If Russia increases the fee then we take away their planes (via maintenance) which pretty much bans them from travelling around the globe.
It would be expensive to divert for Japan and Korea, not so much SE Asia. I can't see Russia fucking with China though.
Flights already do a big detour around Ukraine because of their conflict with Russia. In fact, middle eastern hubs would love Belarus airspace to be restricted, it makes their routes much more competitive. Flights to SE Asia often fly further south, over the caucuses, Afg/Iran to SNG, or Iraq/Iran to Qatar since the GCC blockade. (Iran charges considerable fees for this btw, a good source of hard currency.)
I'm afraid Russia has everything to do with this incident. There is no way they would do this without Putin's okay. That he is willing to risk Russian airspace rights shows how desperately worried he is about popular uprisings.
The ops.group newsletter [0] is a great resource for understanding flight restrictions.
“Nothing untoward was found and the aircraft and its passengers were cleared to depart”
The omissive wording is utterly revolting. While the Ryanair PR people were at it they could’ve taken it a small step forward and said that a few passengers decided to stay as they really enjoyed the sights.
I haven't tried to find the actual flight path, but for a transport aircraft at cruise the "closest airport" would not be underneath the flight's position, but rather at some distance away corresponding to the computed distance to reach the surface in an idle power descent.¹
From 30,000+ feet I'd expect that value to lie around 60–80 miles, iirc.
/Acey
¹–ignoring in-flight fires, medical emergencies, etc., that might dictate an unusually steep descent profile.
Approximate flight data from ADS-B has been plotted and is visible in the article.
Even with the benefit of the doubt, it looks very shady. You could probably argue that it's the closest airport within the airspace they're currently occupying (which was Belarus airspace at the time) but the whole Belarus narrative stinks.
What particularly stinks is the Ryanair response/reaction. I can only assume that Ryanair is being coy about the whole situation because they want to continue using Belarus airspace, but there might be more to it.
It’s likely the pilots were fed a relatively standard line and asked to divert to Minsk.
Unless it’s an inflight emergency pilots will normally follow the recommendations of ATC. “There is a report you have a bomb onboard and divert to Minsk where we have a bomb squad” would likely work.
The flight was travelling due north from Lutsk and had already passed over Lida, approaching the Lithuanian border, before it was diverted. It was significantly closer to Vilnius (its destination) than to Minsk.
How is this relevant considering that according to FlightRadar the closest airport was the destination airport, where they were supposed to land anyway?
Over any terrain with appreciable elevation differences, topographic features can easily rule out otherwise eligible airfields because you'll have to cross granite on the glide down.
/Acey
I left that off before but it begged mentioning since it's a question that asks for a real answer/confirmation if starting from jet cruise altitudes. If you are starting at FL410, you could easily head down a box canyon accidentally when the Alps, Pyrenees, Rockies, etc. are nearby.
Well, that's the statement from whichever employee was manning the twitter account. The statement from the CEO which is more what counts was quite different:
>"This was a case of state-sponsored hijacking - state-sponsored piracy," Michael O'Leary told Newstalk radio.
>"It appears the intent of the authorities was to remove a journalist and his travelling companion. We believe there were some KGB (State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus) agents offloaded at the airport as well,"
Not sure why there is so much talk about death penalty - according to other sources these is 3 to 5 years of prison at max.
That's of cause if the law doesn't change just for this guy in next few weeks.
I think the dictatorship killed him. The pilots just made an unfortunate decision that was understandable given the lack of information and fighter jet on their wing.
I assume a Ryanair flight would also have had a lot of citizens of NATO countries on-board. I wonder what would have happened if it were a US flagged carrier.
My point was that Ireland relies on being surrounded by NATO countries but doesn't contribute anything to the costs of protecting their own airspace. TBF, it is making noises about maybe getting some fast jets at some point.
What is a neutral country? The flight started from Greece (NATO country) was going to Lithuania (NATO country) and the plane is registered in Poland (NATO country).
Similar incident: On October 21, 2016, Belavia flight B2-840 from Kyiv to Minsk (of all places) was told to immediately return to the departure airport, or fighter jets would be scrambled [1]. They were only 50km from their destination country's airspace. After the plane landed in Kyiv, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies escorted a passenger off the plane.
Not quite the same, of course (no third-party country involved and passenger in question was released shortly thereafter), but forcing commercial airliners to land seems to be somewhat more common than I thought.
The major difference of course is that the flight originated in the country ordering the return. Not to mention that they were not inventing a fake bomb to justify it.
The Ryanair diversion is a straight-up airplane hijacking.
For the sanction to really bite, would need to block not just air travel, but people. Otherwise diplomats from Belarus could just fly to e.g. Russia first, and from there to wherever they were going.
It wasn't practical for MH17 to fly around the Donbass either but it would have prevented a terrible tragedy.
And there flights weren't even officially targeted. This flight was intercepted by an armed military jet. From there it can quickly escalate in the event of a misunderstanding.
FYI technically it wasn’t a forced landing by fighter jets. “Someone” reported there’s a bomb on the plane while they were in the Belarus airspace, hence they did an emergency landing in Minsk.
So while we know who “someone” is and that it’s all planned in advance (the journalist reported that he was followed minutes before take-off), technically speaking the safety protocols were followed, and when landed they arrested a wanted man once he was on their soil.
This reminds me of force landing Bolivian president’s plane in the EU flying from Moscow when they thought Edward Snowden was on the plane.
This article and others report that the plane was instructed to land in Minsk, even though Vilnius was closer. That doesn’t sound like following safety protocols to me
There could be less nefarious reasons for that...such has what ATC was in contact at the time, headwind/tailwind can make a difference in speed/time even if the distance as the crow flies is shorter, or if there was more landing windows in Minsk.
It should be considered and questioned, but it may not be nefarious.
You realize plausible deniability is part of tradecraft right? When conducted with any intelligence there will always appear to be a chance nefarious actions "might not have been nefarious". Your odds of a correct judgment are better if you take into account the motives of the parties involved and how directly the inputs/outputs of the system align with said motives. Or do you think it's just a happy coincidence when a politician votes no on a bill the day after a lobbyist opposed to the bill makes a donation? Or one of President Xi's political opponents just goes on an extended and very silent vacation? Or a used car salesman being super friendly to you is just because he's a really friendly guy?
Of course I do. I never said the bomb threat wasn't planned as a false flag, or that the timing wasnt done in a specific manner to ensure the flight was redirected to Minsk.
Only that I have doubts that the pilots did NOT follow the proper protocols or were somehow involved in a conspiracy here. Commercial aviation is one of the few jobs where theres little tolerance for deviation of established protocols and checklists, especially in declared emergencies. And a lot of the routing decisions arent necessarily made by them.
I understand some may find that offensive.. But it doesn't change my view on the matter. Nonetheless, i dont really see what is so controversial about stating it. It doesn't really excuse anything here....
I think you're overlooking the fact that the pilots were not the ones who chose to land at Minsk. The fighter jets "escorting" them make that decision for them.
you don't need to exercise reserved skepticism here. there was no bomb and we know what happened when the plane landed. you're playing devil's advocate when they've already won
I’m stealing that line. It feels like the Internet has inspired a subset of people to play for that team and it’s so confusing as to why. I am trying to always “assume good intentions” as a rule now; I think it’s just deep denial about the world we live in and how free we really are.
It's a form of attempting to disconfirm your beliefs. If it's easy to put together an argument against yourself that you can't rebut, then it's a sign you need to think more. And you can't do that well unless you're in the habit of testing the weaknesses of every appealing new belief.
Oh ... Kay? The thing with that wonderfully high minded approach that seems to get missed: you can do that at home by yourself without involving me by musing out loud in a forum like just maybe you’re smarter than everyone else. You want to check yourself? Do it by yourself.
that works both directions. speculating about the potential legitimacy of every detail of an extraordinary rendition is not intellectual vigilance, it's simping for state terror and it disconfirms nothing.
Im just not outraged...Nor do I have any illusions to Europe, much less eastern europe being all that "free". And finally the plausible deniability was made by the bomb threat, i dont have to manufacture that or convince anyone of its veracity (and I have no illusions about how bogus it was or wasnt).
Im not a pilot, much less a pilot in that part of the world. But I do know that planes are generally only talking to 1 ATC at a time and it takes time to get in touch with another. And that pilots have very specific checklists and procedures when needing to call emergency landings. Listen to the Sully recordings when he ditched in an emergency. NJ was closer but he was still in contact and it would have taken too long.
So if they get called for an emergency and are forced to make a landing, there are protocols in place to swiftly determine the when, where etc of setting down.
Unless you are going to make the accusation that the pilots are political agents/operatives...
> Listen to the Sully recordings when he ditched in an emergency. NJ was closer but he was still in contact and it would have taken too long.
He was _talking_ to NY TRACON. That doesn't mean he was somehow required to land in NY, not NJ. His first request to ATC was whether he could land at Teterboro (in NJ). They got on the phone and got permission for him, in order to avoid having to switch frequencies.
> So if they get called for an emergency and are forced to make a landing, there are protocols in place to swiftly determine the when, where etc of setting down.
Indeed there are, and literally none of them have to do with which ATC center the pilot happens to be communicating with at that point.
> Unless you are going to make the accusation that the pilots are political agents/operatives...
The pilots were looking at a MiG-29 out their window. They did not have a choice in the matter.
> Nor do I have any illusions to Europe, much less eastern europe being all that "free
Europe consistenly gets the highest ranking in things that test for different aspects of freedom (democracy, press, police violence, etc.)
To be clear: it's not that Europe can't do better, but if you care about 'freedom' it's a better place to be than pretty much any other region on the planet.
Was on a flight from Frankfurt to SEA about 2 years back, someone thought they were having a heart attack. Plane was about even between SEA and YVR, we took the most direct route to the runway and terminal I've ever taken coming into SEA over 200 flights. Especially since they kicked a plane coming in before us to the international terminal.
Other interesting tidbit, the person claimed to be fine about 30 minutes later after talking to 2 doctors. But the ground crew said they required people to go to the hospital now for a full eval.
From the article: "Belta, the state-owned news agency in Belarus, said Mr Lukashenko had personally given the order for the plane to land in Minsk following the bomb alert, and that a MiG-29 fighter jet had been despatched to accompany the Ryanair plane."
> “Someone” reported there’s a bomb on the plane while they were in the Belarus airspace
The article doesn't say that the bomb threat claim came from anyone on the plane. Rather, it implies the pilots were informed of the alleged threat by Belarus air traffic control as the pretext for demanding that the plane divert.
Based on the current facts being reported, it seems pretty clear what is going on here.
I think the point being made here is that 7500 would be used for unlawful interference like a hijacking or bomb threat. 7700 would be more appropriate for an interception.
The US has more resources at its disposal to finesse a forced landing. Less powerful countries have to resort to more barbaric means to achieve the same exact result.
This seems a lot more aggressive than what happened with the Bolivian President. The man who had tasked himself with harboring Snowden made everyone think Snowden was on the plane and the US presumably influenced some allies to not allow him to be transited through their airspace. That doesn’t seem totally unreasonable to me. That’s not to say that I side with the US govt in general regarding Snowden.
Wasn’t the Bolivian plane the President’s which meant it was entitled to additional diplomatic protections and couldn’t be required to stop at all? Hence the various governments refusal to allow them into specific airspace so they’d run out of fuel and be forced to stop without being ordered to? It seems like the same goal and the same end result just that it required a little more finesse in their malicious compliance with international treaties.
> Hence the various governments refusal to allow them into specific airspace so they’d run out of fuel and be forced to stop without being ordered to?
> It would be illegal for the pilots to ignore such an order while inside a country's airspace.
The pilots could report that they are having technical difficulties and are unable to override the current route programmed into the autopilot. They are also have issues disengaging the autopilot. So they are "forced" to continue their flight on their pre-filed flight plan.
Any direction from ATC would be replied with "Unable":
> to not allow him to be transited through their airspace.
This is exactly what Belarus just did. The US and it's allies are now strongly objecting that it's illegal and improper to do exactly what they've previously done.
The idea of mutually agreeing to allow commercial transportation aircraft to transit your airspace is supposed to be that this is not done. It is hugely hypocritical for the US to have used this same tactic, even if done through proxies.
Not allowing transit into and through your airspace is not exactly the same thing as allowing transit into your airspace then forcing them down in your country.
It's not exactly the same but it's almost the same - multiple countries synchronously closing their airspace so plane can't just go around single one thus basically forcing plane down as it could run out of fuel is quite similar to faking bomb alert in order to force plane down. Only lame excuse is different.
The fighter jet was there to intercept. All commercial pilots are trained to follow standard procedures when intercepted. Which comes down to: 1. Let ATC know, 2. Establish radio communication or use standard signals if unable, 3. Follow directions by the intercepting plane instead of ATC.
The radio words to use are standardised so they even work in case one side doesn't speak English. The signals are also very simple (rock wings, certain turns, gear up/down).
No need to think about being shot down or not, no need to scare, any commercial flight being intercepted would follow directions.
Huh, surely the Belarusian government wouldn't dare shoot it down? But I guess if I were the Ryanair captain responsible for all souls onboard, landing it is the safest choice.
> Huh, surely the Belarusian government wouldn't dare shoot it down?
No sane or insane pilot is going to risk it, however. Unless the pilot was certain that his and all of passengers fate were in danger, they are going to follow that fighter jet.
That depends - they wouldn't want a plane with a bomb to explode over a city for example, so the jets could be used to "neutralise" the threat.
Obviously in this case the bomb was fake and so the threat...
Belarusian Air Force fighter-interceptor manoeuvred to signal to the pilots of a Ryanair airliner:follow me”. The captain of the civilian aircraft was obliged to obey. The captain may have disobeyed the dispatcher's command, but the threat from a military aircraft was obligatory.
> when landed they arrested a wanted man once he was on their soil.
Did he get on their soil though? Usually, you stay in the international zone when between flights, so, here, the passengers should not have entered Belarus. Do we know what happened in the airport?
The international zone is a individual national concept to simplify their customs ingress at that country's discretion. All countries have the right to ignore it if they see fit, such as law enforcement actions.
I suspect this is why a “bomb” is a convenient cover story for the government. They can force everyone off the plane rather than having to extract a single passenger.
>Did he get on their soil though? Usually, you stay in the international zone when between flights
for example, when US agents capture people outside US and load them on a plane to bring in to US they actually formally arrest and charge them only when the plane enters US airspace.
>International law is not a real thing that has loopholes... it is just a set of agreed upon principles that are usually followed
Nation states exist in a state of nature, and unfortunately might usually makes right. Superpowers can, and often do, simply decide that aspects of international law just don't apply to them. Of course, that doesn't stop them holding weaker powers to those standards.
Sounds more like an International Wishlist. Wherever the venn diagram of What a Country Does and What the World Wants intersects, they pat themselves on the back. Everything else, they shrug. I wonder what's the point.
That is exactly point; so that at least everyone agrees beforehand when praise/condemnation is appropriate. It doesn't enforce itself, but it does at least provide a notional focus point. Countries do attempt to reward and punish each other in various ways, and "international law" gives some direction to it.
What would happen if a pilot refused? My understanding is pilots have near total authority when operating an aircraft so if a pilot knew the “threat” stated was fabricated could they, in theory, just keep flying? Or even landed at a different, closer airport than the one specified?
To be clear, I don’t think pilots should be in a position to judge the truthfulness of ATF or the government they’re flying over and I don’t think pilot judgment is the “solution” to this loophole that has now been abused twice (that we know). I’m just curious about the process and what would happen if a pilot decided to call the bluff. Would Belarus (or whichever country) scramble fighter jets to force a landing? Would the pilot get in trouble? Is the answer different for a private flight vs commercial flight vs diplomatic flight?
I think that airplane will be considered captured by terrorists. If there's a danger of it being used as a weapon of mass destruction, it'll be blowed up to prevent more deaths. I don't think that it would be considered reasonable to blow up aircraft if it didn't present a danger to big cities.
So IMO pilot could ignore their requirements and I think that nothing would happen outside of angry transmissions. Especially if the plane was near border. But I don't think that it would be reasonable, especially in an airplane full of innocent people.
I'm curious what constitutes a "technical" forced landing by fighter jets. I mean, you can't "technically" force a landing at all.
Clearly what happened here is that the fake bomb threat was an excuse, and the purpose of the interceptor there was to demonstrate to the crew of the airplane that the use of force was a possibility. This plane was "forced down" by any reasonable use of the term.
> This reminds me of force landing Bolivian president’s plane in the EU flying from Moscow when they thought Edward Snowden was on the plane.
Had to correct this elsewhere: there was no forced landing there at all. They were denied airspace privileges to cross most of western europe, which isn't the same thing at all. They landed in a friendly-ish nation, and were never boarded by anyone hostile or otherwise intercepted by law enforcement.
What happened in the Snowden case was DIPLOMACY ("you may not travel here if you carry this man"), not force.
Fighter jets can intercept a plane, and tell it to land via radio. It would be illegal for the pilots to ignore such an order while inside a country's airspace.
> It would be illegal for the pilots to ignore such an order while inside a country's airspace.
The pilots could report that they are having technical difficulties and are unable to override the current route programmed into the autopilot. They are also have issues disengaging the autopilot. So they are "forced" to continue their flight on their pre-filed flight plan.
Any direction from ATC would be replied with "Unable":
Indeed, this plane was indeed intercepted and directed to land via radio. I think you're missing my point. Clearly it was forced down, technicalities notwithstanding.
Is it not highly illegal internationally to claim a false bomb threat as well? Any repercussions or do countries not keep track of bad actions like this?
There is no such thing as "highly illegal" international law... international law is just a set of conventions, and are enforced by each nation choosing what to do about the 'violation'. There aren't a set of prescribed penalties, and if there were, there is no one to enforce them.
I guess there is no international penal code. There are treaties but for many of them, there is no enforcement-no worldwide police to knock on your door.
So repercussions tend to range from nothing, through wagging fingers, slaps on the wrist, to sanctions, UN resolutions, UN-sanctioned wars, or if you really piss someone off, non-sanctioned wars.
I don’t think Belarus will be invaded, and I guess Russia would veto any particularly nasty move in the UN, so really this leaves stern words and some unilateral sanctions against the Lukshenko regime. Doesn’t seem like overwhelming penalty (though well-targeted and enforced sanctions can bite quite badly).
I think in this context they basically mean that there are no countries in which a fake bomb threat against an airliner isn't illegal, so whoever did this, in whatever country they happened to be, committed a serious crime.
So someone from the Belarus intelligence service made a call to Ryanair and made a bomb threat. What can Ireland or any other jurisdiction do about it? Pretty much nothing, especially if the call originated in Belarus.
> What happened in the Snowden case was DIPLOMACY ("you may not travel here if you carry this man"), not force.
And MiG-29 sprinkled same kind of diplomacy here - they weren't shot down, they just were diplomatically notified that in their best interest is to land down. See, no force, pure diplomacy.
Again, there was no force with the Morales plane. No one can enter another nation's airspace without permission. They were simply denied permission. It's the difference between being denied boarding for an international flight because you forgot your passport and being arrested once you land. One is "force", one is not.
Denying Morale's plane permission was an act of diplomacy, albeit a very uncommon one and one in pursuit of an unjust goal.
Forcing down a foreign airplane on an international flight to arrest someone on it is an act of war. Sorry.
Nope, that airplane was in Belarus airspace so it's up to them to decide if they want it landed or not. If you don't like it nobody is forcing you to fly over Belarus. Their airspace - their rules.
Same thing happened on 9/11 - US chose do land all aircrafts, and in case that anyone disobeyed orders it would be promptly shot down - foreign planes or not, it didn't matter in slightest.
First, no, there are no international treaties about forcing aircraft to the ground. That is an extraordinary thing done in circumstances of immediate safety concerns. There are, however, treaties that have been in place about unfettered airspace transit access (no idea which exactly Belarus is a signatory to), and this was pretty clearly in violation of those. There is no "you're in our airspace so we do what we like" rule in international air travel, and that's ridiculous to suggest.
Second: they let the plane in on a flight plan that clearly took it to Vilnius. Again, that's false pretenses.
Per the analogy above: consider a consulate telling someone "sure, you can board this plane without your passport, it's fine" and then arresting the person for a visa violation on landing.
The whataboutism here is just insane. Ronald Reagan OK's an interception of a plane containing a known terrorist 36 years ago and now it's OK to hijack airliners anywhere in the world for any reason?
What would have happened if his plane had tried to cross into Spain regardless? Do you think 'force' might have been involved? Is not denying overflight ultimately backed by force?
> What would have happened if his plane had tried to cross into Spain regardless?
A major international incident (the head of state of one nation violating the airspace of another) that completely and utterly dwarfs whatever nonsense was going on with Snowden. I know it's hard for geeks here to understand, but Snowden just isn't that important.
Again: he wasn't even on the plane. And Morales apparently had no intention of putting him on there. He was just pissed off that no one trusted him about that.
You're completely missing the point, or else trolling.
The Ryanair plane didn't deliberately violate the airspace of Belarus in violation of withdrawn permission, they filed a flight plan to Vilnius just like they had every day for years and years. It was an airliner on a scheduled flight.
Your counterfactual involving a deliberate invasion of another country seems... extraordinarily weird. I mean, yes, countries defend their airspace when it's invaded by other nations in violation of established treaties. Duh. That is not what happened yesterday at all and you fucking know it. Stop this.
I wasn't trying to draw an ethical distinction, but if I were this wouldn't be the defining attribute of an action that constitutes "better". They're both reprehensible.
Don't you see the difference? US pressured France and Spain to deny their airspace, but landing in Vienna was pilot's call. The pilot could have returned to Russia if they wanted. They erred on the caution side, and they were greeted by Austria's president. So shady, but not illegal, compared to for example the poisoning of Russia's dissidents by FSB.
What do you think would happen if Ryanair's pilot refuse to cooperate with Belarus's request?
One was tricked into grounding, the other was forced shrug
In both cases it was to detain somebody doing an act of public service on behalf of their country - an act treated as criminal. This is the important part.
Right, so forced and tricked aren't that much different in your book.
Passengers on the Bolivia's flight were at no point in danger. They could have picked another country, Russia or Russia-friendly one to land. Can you say the same with Ryannair's ones? Did they have the choice?
What would France and Spain have done if Bolivia's jet entered their airspace? I'm betting it would have involved fighter jets. That threat is why denying someone entry into your airspace is possible. Well, that and ground-to-air missiles. There's no need to exhibit force if it is already understood that force will by applied if you do not cooperate.
what was the basis and the motive for ally countries unilaterally not to allow the plane to land? If the motives are not different, then the fighter jet could be seen as a similar "technical reason" in this case too.
It was US pressure obviously, for which the countries apologized. It was an asshole move by the US but this is on another level, it involves foreign civilians, KGB agents, fake bomb threats and fighter jets
Mental gymnastic you are doing there. Spain and France denied the airspace, meaning the flight couldn't gone through either of them. There is no "not to allow the plane to land". In fact an airplane calling emergency has priority to land anywhere, regardless of the political difference with the host country.
On this topic, this happened with a flight from a US's air base in Afghanistan, rerouted to Iran because of a "bureaucratic issue":
Quite contrary, I'm asking for the basis and the motive of denying one specific flight with one specific individual on board a routine procedure of air travel, something that was allowed to hundreds of other flights on that same day. "landing" vs "airspace" is a non-essential detail here, and depending on the context of a situation, either could be denied to achieve the desired goal. I'm asking about the motives of the goal.
it didn't even "have" to land in austtria, they landed there because it was easy. They probably had fuel enough to land in any one of a ton of other countries if they so chose.
No, they certainly didn't have to land in Austria. But somehow, god knows why, certain countries closed their airspace for that specific plane. I'm inclined to belive that more countries would suddenly close their airspace too if plane chose not to land in Austria but to go to some country where Snowden won't be in danger of being arrested - France, Spain, Portugal and Italy are hardly the only one that would bow under US pressure.
How long the democratic nations of Europe permit an autocratic regime in their bosom is an open question…if I was Belarus I’d keep my fucking head down.
The thing about a destabilised world order is that it works both ways.
Belarus is backed by Russia. Russia is strong enough to make any attempt of invading Belarus to cost a lot of lives. And invading Russia itself is out of question because of nuclear response. That's how I see that geopolitical situation. War is very unlikely in my opinion.
An appropiate reaction would be to stop overflights of Belarus - which both eliminates the risk of Belarus forcing down civilian planes, and reduces Belarussian income
There are two, Hungary and Poland, and they have each other's back. EU laws weren't designed to be resilient against two failing countries at the same time, so everything would have to be rethought, and we're notoriously slow and bureaucratic. I'm sure the pandemic didn't help either.
If you think that Belarus is close to being as autocratic as Hungary (it isn't) and then you think that Hungary is nearly as autocratic as Poland (which is far from the truth as well), then it's time that you learn more about these countries.
Belarus is probably as autocratic as Russia. Hungary significantly less so. Poland is significantly less autocratic than Hungary.
As a Pole, I don't support the current Polish government, but putting Belarus, Hungary, and Poland into one basket simply feels wrong.
>How long the democratic nations of Europe permit an autocratic regime in their bosom...
There have been autocratic regimes in the region throughout recorded history. It's the "democratic nations of Europe" bit which is novel. I guess gentle pressure will be applied and hopefully when Lukashenko and Putin die or otherwise go we'll get someone more reasonable.
No, it's certainly not. If the bomb threat wasn't real (and I would definitely doubt that it was) that's a violation of the Convention on International Civil Aviation, Art. 5.
- Drop official relations to the regime in any capacity. Diplomatic, economic, sports. Exclude it from membership in any organization where Russia has no veto right.
- Recognize Tsikhanouskaya government as interim government in exile. Insist that this government is the official venue for any engagement (exports, imports, sport event participation).
- Ban all regime officials in all branches from entry.
Tsikhanouskaya has no government and cannot be recognized as a legitimate president, only as opposition leader. There are only indications that she may have got popular vote, but until there are free and transparent elections it is only a rumor - not enough for recognition by democratic standards.
In this role the only topic that can be discussed with her is the peaceful transition of power and organization of new elections - until they happen, there is no recognized government and no negotiation party.
Active non-recognition can be a good option here: since there is no recognized government, in all applicable cases (events, elections in international organizations etc) it shall be decided that Belarus abstained from vote or was absent. Membership and contractual payments from Belarus can be rejected and considered not happening, resulting in suspensions, sanctions and cancellations and so on and so on.
Tsikhanuskaya has a competent skeletal crew that can be built into a government, that's just a technicality. And yes it absolutely can get recognized; historically governments were recognized with less. If democratic process is your only yardstick for recognition of world governments, I have bad news about a lot of places that are none the less recognized.
It is a matter of political will, which is the only thing that is practically lacking.
This won’t be an acceptable solution for EU. The core value of our Union is the rule of law and we must stick to it, taking the legalistic approach even if constraints of it feel too strong. The rule of law is currently being undermined by Russia and its satellites, exploiting every misstep of Western governments to demonstrate the internal weakness of our democracy. Lowering the bar would mean accepting their game, where laws can be bent and serve only as a formal coverup of lawless actions of the rulers.
EU member states have little problem recognizing regimes like Sisi's, post-crackdowns Iran or indeed Lukashenka's own right until the last summer. Neither of these recently were outcomes of democratic processes with statements from the monitoring institutions acknowledging that. There's hardly a room to lower the bar anymore.
It is hard to see requiring an alternative candidate (whose persecution blew up the country) register a victory in increasingly totalitarian place as anything but deflection. Bailing out on technicality.
Russia has military bases and radar installations in Belarus. What are you planning to do about them? Have NATO shoot down Russian aircraft over Belarus?
Ah, I meant from allied states. You'd probably refuse entry to planes that went directly Belarus airspace -> Russian airspace -> allied airspace as well, but you don't have the ability to deny Belarus airspace -> Russia airspace.
Poland is apparently really mad about this, and given that Ukraine is currently at war with Russia you can probably get them on board. Just those two are a pretty good "wall". Maybe add in a few states blocking northern routes (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia), or not as effectively (Germany, Denmark, Sweden) and they're really isolated from everything apart from Russia.
Anyways, idle speculation, I'm definitely not an expert on this type of politics. I'm sure that in reality a move like this would have all sorts of consequences that I can't predict.
I would agree, but the problem is that such sanctions hurt the population the most. This is not a good choice in dictatorships as the population has no choice who to vote for. The regime top clique will keep eating well off smuggled imports, while the general population will starve.
> This is not a good choice in dictatorships as the population has no choice who to vote for.
The population voted for the opposition candidate, took to the streets when the results were rigged, but had no leaders willing to escalate the confrontation when the state had its pants down. The dictator has buckled his pants and has gradually reduced the opposition to posting memes in Telegram chats. And even this activity is no longer safe.
> but had no leaders willing to escalate the confrontation when the state had its pants down
Are we talking about military leaders who support the current dictator? What could the leaders of the opposition have done to escalate the confrontation further?
Pressure to stop pulling this kind of bs if they want to remain a viable economy in Europe.
Honestly, I wish the next step would be for NATO to step in and restore the country to a legitimate government. Between this, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, China, Israel, the world has been way too conivent with the destruction of democracy.
Sanctions only achieve that if they punish the illegitimate government (hopefully without punishing the rest of the population). Being tough for the sake of being tough without having a clear model for what leverage you’re getting is just political posturing.
Belarus is in military alliance with Russia (Collective Security Treaty Organization). Any military action against Belarus will be met with Russian army defending its territory.
Also I think that the more sanctions are put from West to Belarus, the closer it gets to become another Russia state. I'm not sure if that's the outcome West wants to see.
Belarus was within its bounds. They did not shoot aircraft, they released aircraft and all EU citizens shortly afterwards, they have legal reasons to do so (which was likely fabricated, but one can't prove that). It's a bad accident, but it's not a war.
I’m appalled. Just because they didn’t kill anyone (yet, as one passenger is on their way to the firing squad) this should be fine?
This is plain and simple hijacking of an international flight and not “within bounds” at all. Laws are to be followed in principle, not just technical merit, these are not computer games.
>if they want to remain a viable economy in Europe.
About half of Belarus's trade is with Russia. All this would accomplish is making it 90%+ and deepen ties with Russia. Might as well suggest having Russia annex Belarus as a response to the situation.
Yeah, you have such a great legacy when defending democracy all over the world even in cases where you were absolutely dominant military power that this one would be walk in a park - Russia would just stand down, peacefully looking NATO invading its ally on its doorstep. Fortunately no-one in NATO has such illusions.
I know what I will write will sound like I don’t have any empathy but… hitting population hard, to the starvation even, will make them go after Lukashenko. This is why communism in Poland was defeated by the workers. They had no bread so they had to rise. Again, I would like to underline that this is not a solution that I support but history showed us this is how u make a revolution and real change
That's the point, to rile up the population so much that the regime must either cave to whatever is being demanded of them or face an uprising.
Will it work? Very iffy - often the only thing worse than an autocratic regime is whatever fills the power vacuum its fall creates. Disorderly transfers of power are bad business.
It's easy to call for a Hail Mary strategy from afar. Protest is becoming more common[1], but protests that successfully topple regimes remain rare.
I could swear I saw recent research indicating that the fraction of protest movements that lead to regime change has fallen over time, but I can't find it now.
Ultimately it's the people's responsibility to form a functional government that doesn't abuse it's neighbors or fellow citizens. Punishing the entire country is punishing the responsible party. If they have little power at this point to fix it at this point it's their fault for arriving at this point and they may need to pay the long term cost in blood for letting it get that bad.
So I guess the Belarus government would try to claim whatever agreement caused this part:
>1.2.1 Pilots-in-command of civil aircraft should be aware that interception may take place in the event that military,customs or police authorities of a State:
>...
>d) suspect that an aircraft is engaged in illegal flight and/or transportation of illicit goods or persons, inconsistent withthe aims of the Chicago Convention and contrary to the laws of said State.
>...
I note there there is nothing in there about a bomb threat. So the bomb threat was likely a separate gambit that didn't work.
This seems to be quite insane either way. If an interception goes bad the result could be the destruction of the civil aircraft. Not worth the potential risk, no matter who might be on the flight.
It's probably a calculated gambit, they bet the pilot would budge and follow the fighter.
If the pilot didn't I doubt they'd actually shoot the plane down, but that's a bet that they took and won. The pilot obviously chose the safer option for himself and almost everyone onboard.
>Ms Tikhanovskaya said Mr Protasevich, 26, had left Belarus in 2019 and covered the events of the 2020 presidential election with Nexta, after which criminal charges were filed against him in Belarus.
>She said he faced the death penalty in Belarus as he has been categorised as a terrorist.
So the charges were pre-concocted. They didn't have to make any up at the last moment.
I don’t travel much anymore, but when I did I definitely made a point to select routes that avoided flying over basketcase countries. With the number of planes that have been shot down over war zones, or things like this, it’s often feasible.
It was the company’s money and when I explained why I was choosing those flights (being careful to pick the cheapest option that met my criteria) they were fine with it.
As medical cannabis patient, I certainly avoid any routes that could potentially land (e.g. because of technical issue) in a country that is anti-disabled people.
edit: why is this being downvoted? Certain countries have harsh drug laws and couldn't care less whether the use is legitimate or not. Even if you don't have any medication on you, but you have metabolites you can get yourself in prison. This should be called out, but it seems like people have succumbed to prohibitionist propaganda.
I don't know why you were downvoted, but your argument is disingenuous: the anti-drug laws are not anti-disabled people, this is probably a borderline case that was not considered in the legislation. Fake self-victimization may be why you were downvoted?
I am disabled and can't live without this medication as otherwise it makes pain unbearable. Some states don't recognise medical use and can imprison people who have metabolites in the system and are legitimate medical users.
Just because the catchment area of such law is slightly broader than targeting just the disabled, it does not mean these states are not anti-disabled if they prevent disabled people from use of medication.
I find your comment absolutely insensitive and disgusting. Please educate yourself.
I find your attitude as entitled and dishonest; that law did not target disabled people, so you cannot say it is anti-disabled people, it is just a side-effect. It's that simple.
It depends on the country or region. What are the chances to have a family member and a work colleague dead in the only 2 plane crashes in the past 30 years in my country? Well, call it a coincidence, but for me it's a reality. If you fly only in Western Europe or USA, it is paranoid, if you get over Ukraine, Belarus or Afghanistan, it's precaution.
The bigger issue here is... what can Belarusian people do?
It seems nowadays any people acquiring power in a smaller country can only care about keeping this power, and nothing else.
And any revolutionary movement against dictators in these smaller countries can only hope for the replacement of one oppressive regime with another potentially more oppressive regime.
It's a lose-lose situation. And it makes me extremely sad.
Would be interesting to hear the communication between Minsk and the airplane here. For example did the captain make the decision to land solely based on the (false) bomb threat, or was there something more going on. Like were they informed that fighter(s) were dispatched?
I mean it is obviously very bad to make false bomb threats, but its still very different than forcing by threatening to shoot the plane down.
It might be. But political actors are good at leaving plausible deniability regarding their true motives: "We've dispatched a fighter jet to help you find your way to the landing strip."
I imagine the comms would have been something like this:
Minsk Control: FR4978 please divert immediately to Minsk due to potential bomb threat.
FR4978: Minsk Control, by our readings we are closer to our destination Vilnius than to Minsk. By the way, can you explain why a Belarusian fighter jet is flying alongside us?
> Belta, the state-owned news agency in Belarus, said Mr Lukashenko had personally given the order for the plane to land at Minsk following the bomb alert, and that a MiG-29 fighter jet had been despatched to accompany the Ryanair plane.
Lukashenko is showing he's willing to go to great lengths to silence opposition and free press completely in Belarus. Arresting opposition party leaders before elections for made-up accusations is par for the course in Belarus... but now he has been doing the same not only to his enemies, but to any newsagency that dares to as much as hint at criticizing his brutal regime, as he's just done with tut.by[1], the now former largest independent news portal in the country.
The EU has shown no determination to put a brake on Lukashenko's abuses and has been completely passive so far on the matter.
The USA, in my opinion, should show leadership and step in to make it clear that such affront against democracy on a neighbour of its closest allies will not be tolerated. Poland and Hungary (not to mention Turkey a bit further away) are already leaning dangerously close to the kinds of abuse of power only seen in dictatorships, and letting Belarus get away with this international provocation will just make it even more clear that the great powers don't care enough to defend democratic rights anywhere outside their own borders, and they are free to go ahead with their own crackdowns on freedom of expression and disregard of human rights.
Almost all. I can really think of two counterexamples, Japan and Korea (and it took a very long time ~30 years? for korea to figure itself out). Maybe Jugoslavia can be put into that bin too, though it's not clear if the US intervention hurt or helped.
I have to preface this with a very emphatic the ends absolutely do not justify the means, but, defying ill repute and near-unanimous pessimism, Iraq seems to have been able to slowly stitch its parliamentary system back together and respond to democratic pressures (protests, elections) without resorting to fraud and violence. It's too early to celebrate, but things look a lot better than they did ten years ago.
Setting up the Weimar Republic after WW1 didn't go so well, then the aftermath of WW2 there were decades of east+west Germany. I don't see that as a positive example of a foreign power setting up a government.
The Weimar Republic wasn't set up by the Entente and not going to war with the Soviet Union to liberate East Germany was, to put it mildly, a reasonable decision.
> The US is rarely interested in affronts against democracy unless there's a geopolitical advantage to be had by leveraging it.
Who are the countries who are willing to intercede militarily purely to liberate a country?
> From a practical standpoint, US interventions almost always make things worse for the people who live there, and in a lot of cases less democratic.
I think this is a fair criticism—intercession is hard—but the question isn’t whether things are better or worse than they were, but rather whether they were better or worse than they would have been under Soviet influence. And you can analyze this as “whether or not a specific country is better or worse” as well as “whether or not the world is better or worse for the diminished soviet influence that would have been afforded by that country falling under Soviet influence”.
in Afghanistan for how long? now Taliban control more territory then they did before US came in...
Libya? way way worse, i mean its a place you can buy slaves in open markets now after US intervention...
list is huge, some places they would take out democracy to put in puppet dictatorships all in the interest of the US, they will work with Saudi Arabia and in last 5 years starve 80,000 kids to death in Yemen under 5 years.
i can only list a few countries that US intervention ended actually helping both the US and the country.
so yes USA will claim to come in to give "democracy" or what ever humanitarian excuse but its never for those reasons, its always for the interest of US and US corporations, i mean didn't the US take a country just because corporations wanted it for growing Bananas? and still to this day they are messing with them ?
I don't know how you got any of that from my comment. I'm quite explicitly not arguing in favor of interventionism, nor am I arguing that Soviets were evil. I'm making a metaargument that criticisms of US interventionism must compare US interventionism with Soviet interventionism; it's insufficient to say that US interventionism is worse than no interventionism because the latter wasn't a plausible option. So yeah, it's a shitty argument for interventionism because it's not an argument for interventionism. ;)
Soviet influence it is. Lukasenko was a party boss in USSR
Putin was KGB mafia boy.
Kravcuk, and Kucma were party bosses of state enterprises.
Aliyevs were KGB men
Shevardnaze was USSR's foreign minister
The whole of Central Asia is basically ruled by exactly the same Moscow's satraps since late eighties, with exception of wild tempered Kyrgyzstan.
Mongolia, "the 16th republic," also had communist comeback, only ended by an extreme, Norko style economic collapse.
The only country of ex-USSR where CPSU did not recapture the power outside of Baltics was Armenia, but only thanks to power going to their nazis. A medicine worse than the poison.
Which ended in 2003. I'd argue that CPSU, since 1991, has had much less internal influence in Georgia than Armenia, which is still heavily Russian-aligned. Georgia is trying to join NATO...
The US only intervenes if a rich American has a profit motive that benefits them. Standing up for the Bosnians was the last rare instance where this wasn't the case. Selling bombs to both sides to maintain perpetual conflict is the usual favorite play.
The US intervenes in plenty of places where there is no profit motive outside of the standard military industrial complex. I think, for example, it's hard to argue that there was a profit motive in somalia, or bombing that pharmaceuticals factory in the sudan, going back further and getting out of africa, Grenada, e.g. Not that these interventions weren't stupid for other reasons.
Thats not what happened. There was no piracy problem. Then the US toppled the government. Then there was a piracy problem. The US didnt intervene to stop a problem that didnt exist. I was responding to the claim that destabilizing the Somali government in 1993 was profitable to wealth Americans because shipping lanes are near Somalia.
>After the collapse of the Somali government and the dispersal of the Somali Navy, ... groups, using small boats, would sometimes hold vessels and crew for ransom. This grew into a lucrative trade, with large ransom payments. The pirates then began hijacking commercial vessels
Thanks for the insight, I really wasn't aware of the extent of their actions.
The quote I posted is a bit cryptic by itself. What I meant by it was that perhaps the US had plans that would lead to greater benefits for them in the region, but these plans backfired by inadvertently creating the Somali piracy problem.
They did everything right with regards to whatever they were hoping to achieve, but they still failed and then pirates happened.
The US is no stranger to strategic military intervention that costs lives and money and achieves nothing very substantial - from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan.
Speaking of which - what was the profit motive in Vietnam? There was definitely geopolitical motive, but I can't imagine there was a "rich American" person or corporation calling the shots for themselves in indochina
> The US intervenes in plenty of places where there is no profit motive outside of the standard military industrial complex.
It was the cold war. I'm pretty sure the MIC could have justified so much spending in other ways besides vietnam, but we are venturing into counterfactual territory.
Right, US stood up for Bosnians for the goodness of their hearts, not to weaken Serbs, historically Russian allies, and to signal
Turkey and middle eastern oil holders "we support your foothold in Europe".
US bombs landed on Croatian Serbs on multiple occasions thus enabling ethnic cleansing. But no biggie, what's small ethnic cleansing between NATO friends?
> The US is rarely interested in affronts against democracy
A Mig fighter jet was dispatched to shepherd the airliner. This represents a threat to anyone on a flight through or maybe even near Belarus's airspace.
Putin's ambitions seem like a geopolitical risk. Maybe on both sides; it seems Autocrats right now like a good 'buffer' - e.g. North Korea. Plus a new forming 'axis' vs 'democracy' power struggle
Hard to argue with the second when looking at the past 2 decades, but looking broader in the past century I think there are many more arguments the other way. Most of Europe for one.
This is clearly the wrong question to ask if you want to determine whether interventions were merited. You need to ask: is it likely the situation would have been worse... or better had whatever specific intervention not taken place, and you need to include positive and negative consequences to at the very least the wider region, if not the entire globe.
After all, you don't blame a nurse for all their dying patients if their specialty is palliative care; the counterfactual matters.
South Korea became democratic after a revolution against the US-installed government. But even then, it's an incredibly weak democracy - every single South Korean prime minister resigned in disgrace, without any exception, after some kind of illegal action or corruption (!!!).
Japan at the national level is barely democratic, the LDP has won all but one time at the national level in 50+years, and the term in which they weren't power they installed party-loyal functionaries to almost ignore the democratically elected government. A few times they did have premiers from other parties for a brief amount of time, but they never completed a term because they went against the LDP.
In Japan, a party with over 10% of the vote is surveilled as a criminal organization and it's leadership is thus being targeted 24/7 and prosecuted for anything remotely possible such as putting flyers in mailboxes, in order to disrupt the political process.
If it's a democracy, it's one of the weakest ones.
Why LDP is still strong even though it sucks (but I don't say there are any other good party) is due to single-seat constituency system that aims two-party system learned from USA. Thanks USA!
The system is now proven completely failed, but who can change the law is who benefited from the law.
> In Japan, a party with over 10% of the vote is surveilled as a criminal organization
You may refer 調査対象団体 but I can't find the 10% criteria. JCP is the only national party listed on the list for historical reason. I never heard that JCP member had prosecuted by posting mails. Other organizations are really worth to be surveilled. I don't think this is why democracy in Japan is not good.
The GOP wants to check IDs because their voters are more likely to have ID. That’s the only reason. It’s not some noble effort to protect the sanctity of our elections. Illegal immigrants don’t vote.
Kuwait 1990
Haiti 1994
Bosnia and Herzegovina 1995
Kosovo 1999
Colombia 2000+
Afghanistan 2001
Libya 2011
Iraq 2014
There have been a lot of catastrophic $&@$ ups and terrible ideas, but it's selective history to claim there have been no positive outcomes for the people who live there.
You've got this exactly backwards. The invasion of Iraq was a contingent factor in the rise of ISIL. In particular Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi regular army was incredibly stupid. The bulk of the regular army, not the republican guard, acted more as a nation wide police force than a military proper. Disbanding them meant there were now 100,000's of thousands of young men with basic military training with no more income to provide to their family. That became the recruiting pool for both the insurgency and ISIL.
I see no reason to limit discussion of the consequence of what we did in Iraq to 2014, but even then, it's not nearly as positive as what you're claiming. Iraq post 2014 is now effectively a client state of Iran, something that makes life much more dangerous for broad swaths of ordinary Iraqi citizens, as well as the region in general.
I don't think it's reasonable to argue your intervention in my house fire was successful because you used your bulldozer to clean up the rubble, if you were the arsonist that set fire to it in the first place.
If you'd like a particularly poignant "fly on the wall" style look into how ordinary Iraqi people saw the invasion in 2003, and their predictions for the future, check out Iraq in Fragments. Many of their predictions have come true in the years since. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiu8cXhjpX4
So, what do you think the international community should have done in 2014? Or are you advocating for non-intervention in what was unfolding at that point?
Just because a previous intervention was ill advised does not mean a later one was; quite the opposite; you could even consider it taking responsibility for damage caused.
It's clearly not disingenuous to include the 2014 intervention in the list of the more reasonable ones.
I mean, if you present it as somehow excusing the earlier mistake; that'd be a different issue.
The US is not the world police.
Maybe should start with their ally Saudi Arabia first to dispel any doubts, it was not about democracy. Raif Badawi is still imprisoned.
>The US and Saudis both have a very large gun to each other's heads
Thats just not true. Saudi family rule over Arabia is predicated on US support. If all SA oil production stopped it would not topple the US government. If the US decided to back a political opposition like it did in Syria the Saudi regime would implode in days.
Saud family have a lot in the bank, so they could hire someone else if USA politics got rid of their lobbyists who control much of Congress. Are they so weak that they would simply collapse without USA support? I would think they could just hire e.g. some ex-Pakistani military to keep the populace cowed.
Or do you mean to say that USA could easily replace the regime with a different, more-favored one? How did that work in Syria? We're withdrawing from Afghanistan now, and at this time Taliban control more territory than they held in 2001. USA military is a bit of a paper tiger, when it comes to achieving results via military action.
It is not normal to interfere in the affairs of other sovereign nations unless one of the affected nations requests help. And even then the other nations have a lot of additional considerations beyond doing anything but making a sternly worded speech. Most of the time when the USA inserts itself into other affairs people complain about the USA being a bully and sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong. The EU needs to craft a strong response to this by itself or lose a lot of credibility on the world stage.
Edit: just to clarify, some of the USA’s other considerations would be the risk of getting called out for being a hypocrite- it has done a few shady extraditions in the past.
So true. Both Greece and Lithuania are EU members. Part of the EU mission is to provide freedom & security for the members. So here we are, do something.
I suspect the U.S. is already responsible for making this behaviour more common. Can certainly try to make up for it, but I think great damage has been done.
You dont make up for being a brutal expansionist empire by being a "kinder gentler" expansionist empire. Until there is regime change in the US nothing it does will be good for anyone but its own ruling class.
Can you imagine the pressure he is under, knowing full well that Russia stands ready to take the entire country if the possibility of a Pro Europe/Pro Western Party was elected. You don't have to look back too far to see what lies on the horizon, Ukraine was a perfect example of that. Unfortunately Europe (France and Germany mainly)/West (USA) has shown that they are more interested in maintaining a business relationship with Russia than defended against their aggression. They won't even support none aggression treaties they were all a party to.
Is Lukashenko a dictator, for sure, but he is in an impossible situation. The Russians are making sure of that and as long as Western Governments show an indifference to the sovereignty of countries like Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, etc there is no way forward.
He is in impossible situation not because of Russia, but because of corrupt and violent regime he created. Majority of population in Belarus is pro-Russian, so the alliance between countries would persist after the transition of power (see Armenia, Kyrgyzstan for recent examples of how this works). His personal risks are loss of all assets and the fact that the new government will likely demand his extradition from Russia for criminal investigation. Probably the only reason why Lukashenko is still there is that Russia will not revoke its support until there are signs that opposition wins.
> The USA, in my opinion, should show leadership and step in to make it clear that such affront against democracy on a neighbour of its closest allies
The USA showed leadership when it contrived a situation where the president of Bolivia's plane was made to land in Austria, to search for someone who leaked to journalists that the US government was monitoring virtually all domestic phone calls, texts, Internet connections etc.
Leadership in an affront against democracy, as you put it.
It's sad that USA has been seen as the international beacon for freedom and the defender of democracy for so many international struggles but USA has abdicated this role after it was abused by greed and the CIA so many times. Now isolationist voices have gained power domestically. We could have been the super heroes for freedom and democracy that the world needed. Being viewed that way was a big part of our super power's soft power and our loss of it is a big win for China and Russia.
Soft power and American exceptionalism; like apple pie with ice cream, always somehow greater than the sum of the parts. The reality is that our soft power is moderated (mediated?) by the narratives exported by the couple of big media companies that dominate our airwaves (and thoughts.) These narratives have intentionally not, worked to undermine American soft power while promoting the soft power of international organizations like the WHO. Any discussion of soft power that omits the media is hopelessly incomplete. The soft power is being reallocated by our elites, because it was their power to begin with.
We created the WHO and the UN out of an idealism and optimism that derived from an honest belief after WWII that we were the good guys that were going to use our power to spread freedom and democracy. That idealism is what gave us the power. That's why so many popular struggles around the world have used the statue of liberty as a symbol for the society they want to create.
The USA did exactly this themselves. they forced landed Bolivia's presidential airplane in Austria thinking Snowden is on board. Also, the USA is hunting down the likes of Snowden and Assange. So Belarus is following the lead
> Poland and Hungary (not to mention Turkey a bit further away) are already leaning dangerously close to the kinds of abuse of power only seen in dictatorships
Please show me examples in Poland or Hungary of opposition voices being silenced or arrested.
The worst that has happened is withdrawing government financing or grants to entities that aren’t pro government. That’s not exactly a dictatorship.
In Hungary almost all the online press is anti government. No one gets arrested. Their are 5 opposition parties now uniting against government, no one is silenced.
Yes the state TV is pro government. But this is not unique to Poland or Hungary. In fact I’d argue the pinnacle of state TV, the BBC is very much leaning to one side of the political isle right now too.
According to Ukrainian journalists, a similar plan was carried out by US and Ukrainian intelligence last summer, when a group on a flight from Minsk to Istanbul was planned to be arrested after forceful landing in Ukraine. The plan was interrupted by Belarus detaining the group before they took the flight, based on an alleged leak from the Ukraine president office.
So many words about the situation, but what we should realize is what Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend are going through now. I don't even want to think.
I wholeheartedly agree. They must have been terrified from the moment it became clear that something strange was happening. It's also terrifying to observe that noone is helping them
Thing is the BBC article seems to depend largely on an article from a Belarus newspaper, which I doubt has undergone some mangling in translation. Can anyone knowing Russian post an accurate summary of it:
First Freedom of the Air: the right or privilege, in respect of scheduled international air services, granted by one State to another State or States to fly across its territory without landing (also known as a First Freedom Right).
Accurate. Country of Origin is basis in this case which is Greece. Adequate response would be to indefinitely bar all Belarusian originating flights from traveling through any signatory's airspace.
However, this most likely only furthers the goals of the current Belarusian administration for the population there. Enforced strictly, to include diplomatic flights, it may cause measurable change.
That was a direct order from the self proclaimed president. The plane was 10 min away from Vilnius airport but the fighter jet was closer. Do you understand the difference? And btw there is a high chance the journalist will be executed.
I thought this should not stand yes. Not sure if I said so publicly at the time. I was less active on fora.
PS: I am a Snowden supporter though :) I think he did us a great service. I'm not American but he exposed the extent to which our details are shared with US intelligence agencies.
I certainly denounced it, but also keep in mind that the president's plane was not "downed" in nearly the same fashion. Nobody forced the plane to land in any particular spot, and (if you believe Morales) no one searched the plane.
Forget politics, let's turn to normal people. Illicit actions of criminals justify the use of policing force on them in all countries of the world.
The actions are the same: coercion through force, basically. In one case they are wrong (criminal), in other case they are good and justified by wrong actions (policing).
Too much on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand to be definitive. He concludes that every example of a centrist democrat doing whataboutism is fine and every example of anyone else doing it as not fine. I'm sure that will convince lots of centrist democrats. The very idea of having a Donald-vs-Bill sexual-assault contest without even mentioning Tara Reade says all we need to know about this person's judgment. To be fair, the first sentence does that too.
Cool. Well you just wasted at least ten minutes of your life thinking about something that I posted disingenuously in order to demonstrate that whataboutism is about distraction rather than have me trying to stay on topic and directly address your points. In a meta way I suppose I did.
I skimmed it and disagreed with it. Generally, if you can't win an argument based on logic, and then emotional appeals, then you can fall back on jurisdiction. You can attack the other person's credibility (you have no jurisdiction), proclaim that no resolution is possible, the world is too complex (we don't have jurisdiction), or as I now realize whataboutism means this is the right jurisdiction, but nothing you said matters because we're arguing the wrong topic. So yeah, whataboutism is the argument of last resort. Ergo, the one used by people who don't have a good argument.
This is literally not a whatabout since we are discussing the same actions here, forcing an airplane down and breaking international laws, norms and traditions.
Let us try to decide if some of the posters here are hypocrites or not.
Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.
Disproving an argument is not a prerequisite for exposing hypocrisy, these acts can be done separately. And if the other party doesn't address the accusation of hypocrisy there might not be a need for disproving the argument to them, as their position might be politically motivated and not aimed at resolving the issue in principle.
in this case, it is more akin to Charles Manson condemning Shoko Asahara for cult activity, and dismissing his "then why are you doing it?" as "whataboutism".
It is important to know whether the condemning party applies the same standards to their own activities, because there's no possibility of resolving the issue at hand without both parties applying the same principles and standards on everyone, including themselves. And dismissing the significance of this knowledge as "whataboutism" is short-sighted, because it's the tool of establishing standards of morality, and it gives a hint to third parties about the nature of their neighbours involved in the dispute.
That is what the term means in popular culture, but what are the implications?
In practice it means that the side who accuses first (currently mostly SJWs) gets to speak and attack others while using "whataboutism" as a shield to shut up their opponents.
So let's be clear. The US didn't "down" anyone -- the US does not have jurisdiction over any of the airspace in question:
> The day after his TV interview, Morales's Dassault Falcon 900, carrying him back to Bolivia from Russia, took off from Vnukovo Airport, but was rerouted to Austria when France, Spain, Portugal and Italy[2] reportedly denied access to their airspace, allegedly due to suspicions that Snowden was on board.
I'm sure the US applied diplomatic pressure, but those countries are all developed, rich economies who were perfectly capable of saying no and preserving their sovereignty. It was done with full consent of the countries in question.
Evo Morales' plane wasn't grounded by anybody; they chose to land, with a suspiciously convenient reason. Given Evo Morales whole anti-imperialist persona, and how he hyped his support for Snowden (appearing to consider offering Snowden asylum on a public TV interview just a day before, to hammer it home), and the fact that it's not even really clear which countries actually denied access to their airspace (the Bolivian account is disputed), and that nobody forced the plane to land or even requested it to, you kind of have to conclude that this was a political stunt by Evo Morales.
To put it this was: the US and it's allies were played for fools, highlighting their unreasonableness. But in no way shape or form is this similar to the current situations in anything but the most superficial sense.
That however, is not true; the air traffic control in Belarus directed them to land in Belarus; and scrambled fighter jets to intimidate them into compliance.
A kidnapping is not the same thing as denying entry; nor are the victims equally reasonable even if the crime were - a civilian plane vs. that of a diplomat that wanted to pick exactly this fight.
Cannot be allowed to stand by whom? Everyone else is too busy silencing proper journalists, in what world are we where you actually think there is a country that stands for 'free speech'? Speech that's against the status quo gets silenced, just cus you buy everything the MSM sells doesn't mean the rest of the world has to. People need to travel(or explore different perspectives if possible) more or at least stop spreading ignorance.
Let’s say you were a foreign actor who wanted to disrupt Belarus. Calling in a bomb threat of this kind would be a pretty smart way to do it.
Of course, it could be much more straightforward than that (it could just be that Belarus did this for their own reasons). But it’s interesting to think about.
Beyond what the media says about the obvious authoritarian regime, can anyone Belarusian, or a blogger/source, describe the social climate, socioeconomics, political climate, and day-to-day life? How Soviet / Russophile are some people but not others?
I’m wondering, what kept them from outright shooting the plane down instead of lying about a bomb on board?How would the public have found out about what happened?
NATO has very heavy radar and ELINT coverage over that area, due to proximity to Kaliningrad. An intercept and shoot down would have been observed. Since the aircraft is Polish registered, and flying from Greece to Lithuania, it would be viewed as a direct attack on NATO.
This more mild strategy worked perfectly: Lukashenko gets to execute a political threat on trumped up charges, and there's essentially zero risk of a reprisal other than further sanctions, which were going to happen anyhow.
This is one of the reasons why I wish US/NATO had taken a stronger stand vs Russia's hybrid warfare tactics.
These are interesting and good points. They also will probably torture the arrested journalist and try to get information out of him. Can’t speak if dead.
This is an incredible assault on EU right. A flight leaving EU soil, arriving to EU soil was diverted and forced to land on a country essentially ruled by a strongman, in order to arrest an opposition journalist.
Of course Lukashenko has the backing of Putin, so it is a slippery slope. I wonder how the EU will react. This is a major transgression.
There is a lot they could do but the question is what they are willing to do. Right now they only appear willing to "object loudly" which they know will accomplish nothing.
If they really want to get this guy released and set a deterring precedent they would start playing hardball, which could include things like:
* Deny Belarus aircraft the right transit anywhere in the EU.
* Do so while some Belarus aircraft are on the ground in the EU and don't allow them to leave. This effectively holds those planes hostage as a bargaining chip, though it's really leverage on the Belarus airlines (and the planes themselves are probably leased). But it still creates problems for the regime.
* Refuse to allow the transit of any Belarus top officials anywhere in the EU. Start expanding this list daily to include more people and their direct families and make the directive permanent until the guy is released. Once you get the spouses of a couple dozen of the top people in the regime contemplating spending the rest of their lives without Italian vacations or Parisian shopping - much less just being able to go anywhere other than Russia - you're starting to cause some hard conversations about how much making an example of this guy is really worth.
Sadly, I doubt the EU will do any of this type of stuff but barring that, there's really no incremental cost to Belarus, nothing will happen and this guy is screwed.
Restrictive measures include a travel ban and an asset freeze. The travel ban impedes those listed from entering or transiting through EU territories, while the asset freeze is used against the funds or economic resources of the listed persons. In addition, EU citizens and companies are forbidden from making funds available to the listed individuals and entities... Today's decision follows up on the agreement reached by the EU foreign affairs ministers at their video conference meeting on 19 November 2020. The sanctions will now apply with immediate effect... A second set of sanctions targeting Alexandr Lukashenko and 14 other officials was imposed on 6 November 2020.
I mean we can quibble about what constitutes "top officials" and the expansion is not daily - but it does exist and it is expanding.
>Sadly, I doubt the EU will do any of this type of stuff but barring that
Yes, nothing happened after another rigged elections, Apparently around 30000 people are still detained since August, since brutally stopped protests. Nothing will happen again, but Belarus should be declared as space not safe for air transit.
I mean, Russian-employed militants in eastern Ukraine downed a civilian airliner and Russia suffered no serious consequences. Russia just denied and obfuscated.
They've poisoned people with radioactive substances on NATO soil, without serious consequences. Just denials issued.
Putin keeps calling the west's bluff. Having a nuclear arsenal seems to let you do that.
Start investigating about Russian high-state officials. Plenty of them have EU or US citizenship. Sometimes their relatives, but it's all from stolen money. Arrest their goods, put their money on hold, until they present proofs of their money being earned by a lawful means (those proofs will be fake, because their money are from bribes, extortions, thefts).
I'm sure that Belarus is in the same boat.
Sherlock Holmes's house in London is owned by Nazarbayev's daughter. It's so ironic.
The largest trade partners for Belarus are: Russia, Ukraine, Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Poland, China (imports), Lithuania, and Italy (imports).
The EU can severely damage the economy of Belarus by cutting off all trade and financial ties. And then work with the US to essentially destroy the country economically by cutting it off to nearly all global trade and financing. The only thing left to prop it up would be Russia and some Chinese imports; it would make Belarus a hermit state economically.
All the US has to do is say: we'll sanction any bank, corporation or person that does business with Belarus. Most will instantly capitulate, just as they did with Iran.
If the US asks Britain, Poland and Ukraine to suspend all trade ties to Belarus, they'll do it. Combine that with the EU members, and Belarus no longer functions in terms of having access to the global economy.
The downside to smashing Belarus in such a way, which would be very easy to do, is that it'll just throw Belarus into the hands of Russia entirely. Lukashenko knows that context with the West and has been playing the angles for a long time accordingly.
"The Americans promised that Nato wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted."
People never quotes Gorbachev conclusion in that article, since he denies your denial:
"The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990. With regards to Germany, they were legally enshrined and are being observed."
https://rg.ru/2014/10/15/gorbachev.html
> Mikhail Gorbachev: The issue of "NATO expansion" was not discussed at all and did not arise in those years. I say this with all responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised it, including after the termination of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. Western leaders did not raise it either.
> Another question was discussed, which we raised: that after the unification of Germany there would be no advancement of NATO military structures and the deployment of additional armed forces of the alliance on the territory of the then GDR. In this context, Baker's statement mentioned in your question was made. Kohl and Genscher spoke about the same.
In summary: no discussion, no promises, no agreement.
You misinterpret "violation of the spirit". He hoped for better future than currently is, a future of peace and cooperation that would not need Eastern Europe clinging to NATO for security from Russia and its puppets. Ideally, NATO would've become obsolete and Russians would be enjoying the same quality of life as Germans are. The reality is much bleaker and that 1990 spirit is dead. That's what he meant.
You idea about a misinterpretation of Gorbachev's words "violation of the spirit" is contradicted by the rest of that sentence, binding the spirit to the words of the Treaty of 1990.
The very promise to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastward is, as he says, legally enshrined in that treaty: "Foreign armed forces and nuclear weapons or their carriers will not be stationed", though only for the east "part of Germany". At that time it would have been unthinkable to discuss any further expansion of NATO.
To blatantly deny this fact is "modern-day NATO propaganda". But you are welcome to claim, that "no discussion, no promises, no agreement" about this was ever written in treaties - if you every time remember to add "except for the part about eastern Germany, where that promise is very well documented".
> At that time it would have been unthinkable to discuss any further expansion of NATO.
Exactly. It wasn't discussed, nothing was agreed upon or promised to anyone.
Most Eastern European countries that later applied for NATO to secure themselves from increasingly hostile Russia didn't even exist as countries at the time, nor did Russian Federation. It was a totally different time and suggestions of promises about NATO membership availability to Eastern Europe are an anachronism.
> This is an incredible assault on EU right. A flight leaving EU soil, arriving to EU soil was diverted and forced to land on a country essentially ruled by a strongman, in order to arrest an opposition journalist.
Note that the EU did something similar: The forced Evo Morales to land in Vienna (on a flight from Moskow to Bolivia) because they suspected Snowden on the flight.
Not EU, but some of the EU member countries (France, Spain, Portugal and Italy). They denied flyover permission to that aircraft, causing it to divert.
Since it was heading for Bolivia it obviously had enough fuel to go back to Moscow, if needed - for instance if Snowden had actually been onboard.
The thing that happened today (faked bomb alert and landing order accompanied with a fighter jet escort) is not on the same level.
Is a window with different dressing not the same window? Does the window matter or the dressing? Belarus is clumsier than the US but the game is the same.
A threat of violence is a very large difference, I would not call that just window dressing.
Also lying (fake bomb threat) is a big difference.
It's like the difference between someone stealing your wallet, vs. letting you play some kind of street game where you don't actually have a chance of winning.
The method employed matters, it's not just about the final result.
Today's hijacking: the result was that the journalist was arrested and now may be facing the death penalty.
The denial of flyover rights to Morales' jet: there was no risk of capture to Snowden - worst case, he'd just have to back to Moscow. If he had been on the flight.
Again, if Snowden had been on the flight, they could have returned to Moscow.
Yes, there was obvious BS from Morales' pilots about uncertain fuel readings - if that had been true the actions of those EU countries saved the life of Morales and others onboard.
In addition, it was a scheduled passenger flight between two capitals of EU/NATO countries, not some private flight with special clearances. Completely unrelated civilians returning from a holiday inside the EU were taken hostage.
> A threat of violence is a very large difference, I would not call that just window dressing.
They forced the plane to land by locking all airspace around it. And yes, they would also have started fighter jets if the plane would enter the forbidden airspace.
An irony to the story is that Poland (who is a party to this as the registration country of the actual plane, and a self-declared leader of the anti-Lukashenko movement) now demands the EU takes strong actions to secure the EU (Poland)’s security.
Literally yesterday prime minister went on record to say they will outright ignore the ruling of the highest EU court on an ecological / energy case (lignite mining close to the Czech border.
What makes this really complex for the EU is that they have tried to punish Poland for this and other various things, but a sanction requires the agreement of all member states, and a certain state named Hungary has an implicit agreement with Poland to never vote in agreement with the EU, and Poland the same for Hungary.
As a result, the EU tries to sanction Poland, but Hungary won't agree and so the sanction fails. Try to sanction Hungary? Poland is out, sanction fails. I have to admit that it's clever on Poland and Hungary's part, as it lets them selectively ignore some of the EU's more (from their perspective) overbearing rulings.
It is also a realisation that with ambitious projects you need to give up some sovereignty. All trade deals do that - swap some economic benefit for some legal commitments.
It’s not even like the EU has big expectations of Poland. The sticking point now is an independent judiciary and free press. Seriously, it’s embarrassing that Poland has to be strong armed into these!
In any case, Poland freely signed up to these commitments, it’s just bad form to eke out of them like this. Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland.
"Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland."
Who voted them in? If you say that the people voted them in, it's painful, but it is the politics of the region. One of the terrifying parts of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for their leaders, including leaders who will actively undermine their own democracy, and they can be content with that because that's what they wanted. In which case, democracy has done what the people wanted, by ruining democracy.
It's kind of like Jury Nullification, where Juries do not strictly need to vote on the merits of whether a person is guilty or innocent, but can vote against the law and know the law can't punish jurors for a "wrong judgement". Judges hate that loophole but know it's a necessary part of democracy. Similarly, the ability of a democratic people to vote to end democracy is democracy working even though it is also an awful necessary loophole.
And if you say that we must take effort to prevent a democratic people, legally speaking, from democratically voting to end democracy, you are now technically anti-democratic. That's a weird place to be.
Aspiring dictators don’t run on abolishing democracy. It is not helpful to frame it like the people chose to ruin democracy.
Democracy depends on a strong free press and independent courts. A strong free press is not just one part of a country’s businesses, it is quite literally the fourth pillar of democracy.
> It's kind of like Jury Nullification, where Juries do not strictly need to vote on the merits of whether a person is guilty or innocent, but can vote against the law and know the law can't punish jurors for a "wrong judgement". Judges hate that loophole but know it's a necessary part of democracy.
Juries are not a thing in most countries that are generally considered democracies, so jury nullification can't be all that neccesary.
The EU is a very interesting thing to watch as an American because the EU has parallels to our Federal Government in scope, but is almost like an alternate history where States had the right to secede and retained nationhood unlike our states.
Also, if the political tensions in our nation continue to increase and don't stop, I would not be surprised in a decade from now if we start talking about replacing the Federal Government with a more EU-like arrangement.
I’m not an EU expert so hopefully someone can correct me if I’m wrong. But I think the USA-EU comparisons are superficial at best. The EU has half the states the USA does but 50% more population.
Unlike the USA—which has a really strong executive branch—there is hardly any executive branch in the EU. Instead the executive powers are held almost entirely by the member states. The EU does have a legislative branch (just like the USA) with around 650,000 people per representative. USA has around 750,000 but that number is further devalued by the USA senate (3,500,000 people per representative) which can hold a lot of power over the congress. I’m not aware that the EU has any equivalent.
The scope of the two systems is also vastly different. The USA federal government represents the foreign policy of each of the state, funds a military which answers to the government, finances much of the infrastructure within the USA, etc. In the EU foreign policy is largely held by the member states, there is no EU military, and funding for infrastructure projects is more likely to come mostly from the member state it self, then from the EU. The USA collects federal taxes, while the EU gets their funding from the member states.
Both have a federated court system. The USA have federal criminal courts which I’m not sure that the EU has, or at least not in the same way the USA does.
To summarize: The US federal government and the EU have in common that they both have a democratically elected legislator (both with relatively low representation) and they both have a federal court system. But this is where the similarities end.
There was a period in American history, the Articles of Confederation, which is more similar to how the EU works today.
> The Articles of Confederation created a loose union of states. The confederation's central government consisted of a unicameral Congress with legislative and executive function, and was composed of delegates from each state in the union. Congress received only those powers which the states had previously recognized as belonging to king and parliament.[15] Each state had one vote in Congress, regardless of its size or population, and any act of Congress required the votes of nine of the 13 states to pass;[16] any decision to amend the Articles required the unanimous consent of the states. Each state's legislature appointed multiple members to its delegation, allowing delegates to return to their homes without leaving their state unrepresented.[17] Under the Articles, states were forbidden from negotiating with other nations or maintaining a military without Congress's consent, but almost all other powers were reserved for the states.[18] Congress lacked the power to raise revenue, and was incapable of enforcing its own legislation and instructions. As such, Congress was heavily reliant on the compliance and support of the states.[19]
Of course, the EU functions better since it has its funding sorted out, whereas the executive under the Confederation more or less begged for money every year and did not usually get its requested allocation.
They don't have much similarities right now, that's agreed. However, I still think it's interesting because imagine if US States retained their sovereignty and the ability to secede at the US Founding. We might have ended up with something much closer to the EU today.
It's basically why the Articles of Confederation failed. The federal government was too made to weak to achieve much - each region (New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Carolina) was individually powerful enough to ignore it.
Although, the EU is a lot stronger than the Articles of Confederation ever were, given that the EU has sorted out how it gets funded from year to year.
And the EU should be free to insist on terms for membership of the organisation. If Poland/Hungary don't want to follow the terms they should just leave, like the UK just did.
But they don't want that hassle, and they want to keep the EU benefits, so this mutual veto of sanctions is definitely a loophole to keep as many benefits without meeting the requirements.
The EU is not the UN, while the UN's goal is to have every country in membership, and so it doesn't expel dictatorships just for being dictatorships, the EU is pretty explicit about democracy and human rights being requirements, which is why e.g. Turkey has not been allowed in so long.
Had Orban had the level of control when Hungary joined that he has now, Hungary would not have been allowed in. PiS is probably not yet at that level, but it's clear they would like to be.
And in which case, I would say this requirement, in practice, wasn't a requirement. I don't blame Hungary and Poland for gaming the system as much as I blame the EU for having this loophole (or feature, or necessary evil, depending on view).
There are many cases in life where, it seems, the best state is not a Nash equilibrium. Still, I don't think it's fair to say "just game it then". That's a quick race to the bottom.
The constructive equilibria in political systems appear to be unstable, and need active work to keep them there. The EU is in fact born out of that very realisation - its earliest seeds are in binding France and Germany in an economic union so they stop going to war with each other!
It‘s very simple. The EU was originally a market union, which every member state profited from. For some reason, the EU has been adopting more and more powers completely unrelated to international trade, and it shows because you will never get 27 different nations to agree on controversial issues.
And this is why I don't think that the ability for a few states to group together and ignore the EU's rulings is an automatically bad thing. States know that this protects them from becoming the US and losing most of their sovereignty.
Hungary and Poland both joined when the EU was in its current form - they knew what they were getting into. It's not liked they joined the EC or ECSC and just got pulled along for the ride into the EU's current state.
Generally these sorts of organizational problems are resolved by having different thresholds of consensus required for adopting different kinds of policies. Majority, super-majority... Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.
> Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.
No it isn't. Some 30% of decisions are made unanimously in scotus, and this is hardly an outlier. Requiring unanimous consent makes things way slower, yes, but it doesn't prevent them. Not all organizational changes need to be controversial. Several conservative programming languages did well by requiring unanimity in initial years - only adding what all could agree was good. It only requires those members to exercise good judgement.
It depends on what you think the design should have been. Some might look on and say that the ability for states to group together and not permit what they view as an overbearing ruling as a feature. Others would call it dissent.
On the other hand, EU states retain their national sovereignty, and could leave the EU if they disagreed with the EU that deeply, which the UK has currently done. The ability for states to group together and buck rulings, in a sense, makes it less likely for states to leave the union entirely. This ability may also have helped convince states to join the EU in the first place.
If you think that the EU (which is primarly Germany and France) are giving out free monies to Eastern Europe just like that, then you have fallen victim to Berlins propaganda.
In reality, what Germany and France buy with that „bribe“ is being able to freely export their goods (cars and retail items via international supermarket chains in particular) to Eastern European markets, while making sure the profits go back to the motherland (and are taxed there by the German/French government, leaving nothing in Eastern Europe).
This is not about money flow. I'm fine with that. What is not fine is the state capture this money flow facilitates. The state capture propagates a crony system, that will lead to a reduced economic output from what it could have been, and hence requiring more support in the future. The situation is both economically and politically untenable.
Ah ok I see, could you explain what exactly you mean by „state capture“? That the money goes to the state instead of private companies and the state is inherently wasteful etc?
I advice you familiarize yourself with the state capture in Hungary by Orban and his Fidez party. The ruling party has eridacated free press and is close on ending judicial independence. They remain in power mainly because they funnel EU money to their voters. Poland is on it’s way in copying this system.
But to update the law (because this sanctioning mechanism is so deep in EU law), you would need agreement from all member states. You can see where this is going... The EU won't try it because Hungary and Poland would obviously vote against it. And the cycle continues.
The current EU plan is to hope that Hungary or Poland's governments get replaced with one that won't support the other, and then consider doing the sanctions.
The other EU plan is to pursue other punishments that don't require a full sanction and basically cause as much hurt as possible even if they can't do the ideal remedy.
They already tried to do a runaround when Poland and Hungary threatened to veto a Covid recovery fund - basically, just set it up anyway for the rest of the 25 as a side deal that wouldn't involve the two and they wouldn't get any funds. In the end Poland and Hungary acquiesced, yet in a petty dictatorial fashion claimed they had won by forcing the EU to include them.
Let‘s not use the word „dictatorial“ in an extremely inflationary way. You can call it a government PR spin if you want, but I think no country in the EU is anywhere close to anything like North Korea or even Belarus.
If anything, it's "dictatorial" in the Sacha Baron Cohen "The Dictator" sense: "Victory! We won! We forced them to include us ...by acquiescing to their demands."
Thanks to those who downvoted showing the continued idiocy or lack of many people on HN who can't see the value that a simple comment can have even on triggering replies; and reaffirming why downvotes are stupid and lazy.
The genuine irony is how Poland, my home country, within 24hrs went from telling the EU to go stuff itself to begging for help, and seemingly even without noticing the contradiction.
For the journalist, I feel very sorry (I don’t know much about him tbh but death penalty is excessive for any crime, even more so for one imagined by Lukashenko). This doesn’t preclude making a wider observation.
But surely, this is what my Russian masters told me to say on the major geopolitical forum that is HN. Da svidania.
I am not sure I see the contradiction here at all. If the two issues are related, it is in a very tangential manner. I mean no offense, but it sounds like a talking points and not like an actual argument.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
Ok, thanks for pointing why I got flagged and -2 points. Just for your record, Sasha is not Polish name at all, but is one of most popular russian one, that already shows some attitude at least and in conjunction to fuzzying discussion by introducing new focus elements and or discrediting actions by pointing to non related actions, that all is to me VERY suspecious. And need to point that too - all of it can be purely accidental. It is just too often it is not, that led me to try to save you from that crap. Will not do it again, sorry.
Germany ignores EU all the time, currently building second pipeline bypassing other EU states in accordance with Putin-Merkel pact, the second act to Molotov-Ribbentrop.
In addition to fiscal rules mentioned in other comments, an interesting case was the confiscation of face masks in spring 2020, i.e. blocking of free movement of goods inside EU. This was when we were desperately needing to have masks for use in hospitals. Germany took them in transit.
It wasn't only Germany, though; also France stopped shipments of masks to Sweden. And there were other cases in the big key member states.
Normally such freight would go via hubs in Germany, for instance; to avoid Germany confiscating masks, my country (Finland) hired planes to import masks directly from China, without using the hubs in Germany.
Germany and Italy recurrently ignore the Stability Pact rules, thereby threatening the fiscal and monetary stability of the region. But when you are Germany or Italy, no one will complain and no judge will chase you.
I had an Italian farmer explain the Italian attitude to rules and regulations 10ish years ago. His view was that breaking rules and regulations was a national pastime and seeing what you could get away with was part the fun.
That’s how he explained the popularity of Silvio Berlusconi too - “of course the guy is a cheat and a fraud, but he is cheating for us now”.
I’m unsure if these views were in any way representative but I found them interesting.
Plane is back in the air with 6 less people, the journalist and his girlfriend, and 4 others who may have the KGB agents orchestrating the “bomb threat”
How about throw out Belarus of the international aviation treaties? If they misuse air traffic control to misdirect planes, maybe throw them out of the system.
Obviously. I’ve also heard that, when you have been rejected for a US visa, you cannot fly from Canada to Latin America, because you cannot fly over the US.
I wonder how they even knew who was no board... Are airlines forced to share the passenger list with every country they fly over? That's news to me, and seems like an unacceptable intrusion of privacy...
The journalist was being followed by Belarussian KGB agents in Athens, and they boarded the flight with him. They didn't need passenger information from the airline.
Would the fighter have shot down the airliner if it hadn't complied? Seems like enforcement options are quite limited for such fast-moving, fragile vehicles.
The pilot must have had a range of options. Some of them might have risked the shooting of the plane. Others might have stalled, embarassed and/or documented this attack by Belarusian forces.
I had a formative experience regarding the game of chicken years ago. It might look very much off topic at first sight, but please read on and decide for yourself.
When I was in secondary school, bored teenagers repeatedly threatened local school bombings, causing the repeated evacuation of several schools. Never the one I went to school at. I later learned why from my father, a teacher at the school. The school did receive bomb threats just like the others. The school head did warn the police. After a short discussion with them, he firmly and politely informed them that our school would not be evacuated, and that was that. He was - and is, at 87- a quiet and soft spoken man, a well respected member of society, but definitely not afraid of a game of chicken.
I think your example is very apropos, but people won't just go voluntarily "die on a hill" without support.
My guess would be that the gentleman running the school in your example was widely respected and had a solid relationship with his appointing authority (school board, upstream executive, etc) -- they had his back.
Does Ryanair offer that type of confidence to pilots as commanders of their aircraft?
Korean Air Lines Flight 007 (also known as KAL007 and KE007)[note 2] was a scheduled Korean Air Lines flight from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage, Alaska. On September 1, 1983, the South Korean airliner servicing the flight was shot down by a Soviet Su-15 interceptor. The Boeing 747 airliner was en route from Anchorage to Seoul, but due to a navigational mistake made by the KAL crew the airliner deviated from its original planned route and flew through Soviet prohibited airspace about the time of a U.S. aerial reconnaissance mission. The Soviet Air Forces treated the unidentified aircraft as an intruding U.S. spy plane, and destroyed it with air-to-air missiles, after firing warning shots which were likely not seen by the KAL pilots.[2] The Korean airliner eventually crashed in the sea near Moneron Island west of Sakhalin in the Sea of Japan. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed, including Larry McDonald, a United States Representative from Georgia. The Soviets found the wreckage under the sea on September 15, and found the flight recorders in October, but this information was kept secret until 1993.
Understandably, people focus about the air maneuvre aspect of this story first.
But if you put that aside for a moment and look at things from a higher level perspective: the president of a whole country is SO AFRAID OF A SINGLE YOUNG BLOGGER that he redirects a whole plane, thereby doing a "full Barbara" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect).
Its not the Streisand effect when you are trying to very publicly establish that you will inflict harsh consequences on people doing what the target has done.
They did not do the same thing at all. Refusing permission for a state aircraft to transit your airspace is very different from forcing a civilian plane to land in your country under false pretences, in order to make a political arrest of a journalist.
It might be different to a lawyer, but in reality it's the same. Forcing a plane to land so you can search for / arrest someone. About the same as "theft" and "civil forfeiture" are different...
The two big differences are that Belarus actually forced the plane to land (the Bolivian one could have just gone back) and that this was a plane full of civilian passengers, not a diplomatic jet.
To be fair, there were mild protests when US did it. And it was a truly big deal at the time since there was another government official involved IIRC.
Your claim is false. The US did not do the same thing to "the Snowden jet."
No plane was diverted due to a fake bomb scare to force a landing.
The Bolivian President's plane landing was a PR stunt solely for his own self-aggrandizement to be seen as challenging the US, it was not forced to land by the US or by a US fighter jet.
NATO countries revoking airspace when you're flying through NATO controlled airspace over a US geopolitical matter is a threat as deadly as a gun to your head. Rerouting and not landing would be met with more airspace walls the opposite direction.
It's not a question of fuel, it's a question of geometry. You have two options, comply or death.
An audio tape was subsequently released which appeared to be a recording of the flight crew requesting to land in Austria on the grounds they "could not get a correct indication" of their remaining fuel levels.
Rather than citing wikipedia, read the article that citation is from. It's literally titled "minute by disputed minute", and should be read between the lines.
They were going to refuel in the Canary Islands, but Spain blocked access to Spanish airspace if they wouldn't subject themselves to a search. Italy, Spain, and France had all blocked access to their airspace and they were boxed in. Austria also admits they only gave landing permission (to a plane already in their airspace, that even then tried saying it was an emergency that they need to land) under the condition that they consent to a search.
So yeah, like I was saying, it was ultimately a question of them being boxed in while over NATO airspace.
The end point, yes, they were threatened with their plane being cut off from all options and falling out of the sky if they didn't submit themselves to a search. Just as deadly as a gun to their head. I'm not sure how your citation could be interpreted to back up your original argument.
Since I can’t just copy & paste the entire article back to this comment:
- All mentions of Canary Island refueling are post Austria landing
- Spain is the conditional search-for-landing country (comment given by Spanish PM in aftermath of Austria landing)
- Morales’ flight requested to land in Austria because of fuel reading issues, not geometry.
There is no indication of “boxing in”, unless Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia are part of it. The flight had permission through Poland, Czechia, and Austria before being denied Italy, France, and Spain. Morales called their bluff by landing in Austria instead of calling Czechia’s or Poland’s by heading back to Russia and proving the box-in.
We’re left with “More airspace walls & boxing-in” being entirely hypothetical and untested, “geometry > fuel” with a flight choosing to land because of fuel issues, and an end point in Vienna because they never turned around.
A gun to one’s head is much simpler, and indeed significantly more threatening than the convoluted political games involved in searching a diplomatic flight, if only for the reason I can’t call the gunman’s bluff by simply sitting down in Austria.
That is not what is suggested in link I have posted. I advise you to read it.
It is not wrong to acknowledge the problem and point to the other reference of it. But comment under which I have posted the link was just redirecting attention to elsewhere without acknowledging the problem. So maybe next time you should be more attentive before posting your comments.
Sure if words don’t have meaning then there’s no difference here.
In Snowden’s case they knew that Snowden could not leave Russia, without being detained and potentially extradited. If Snowden was extradited he would be tried and go to prison, probably. Snowden of course shared state secrets, an act he knew was illegal.
The activist organized protests and his plane was hijacked without prior notice. And now he will likely be executed, for organizing peaceful protests.
EU and NATO are too meek to answer this unprecedented act of state terrorism with something stronger than expressing their 'deep concern'.
In turn, this will further embolden putin / lukashenko gang to bigger and more outrageous acts. This gang understands only force. Something like a rocket killing a top government official, or seizure of assets.
(I say this as a Russian citizen who was recently detained by the police at an anti-Putin protest)
You're right that increasingly often the EU is not making a clear enough stance about what it supposedly believes in, and this isn't about trying to act tough but to show some determination to exist around the ideals of its creation.
If this event doesn't lead to something significant, it would once more fail at points 2,3,5, and 6 of its core values[0]. As a EU citizen I'm hoping for the long-term success of the EU but not always very confident in it..
All the best to you, particularly courage and luck in the face of what you have to deal with locally..
Worst possible choice. Even without taking international costs, it will be best day for propaganda and thus elite. And perfect feed for ultra-nationalistic movements - so even if manages to produce change in government, it will be second Iran, not second Poland.
>seizure of assets
Best one. After enough mansions are seized and comfortable retirements destroyed, couple of skulls will get caved by a snuffbox and all the geopolitics garbage will be thrown out of the window. With following power struggle, that might even be second chance to form sane government.
Reconsider this. This is a 1 man regime, possibly 2-3-4 men regime.
Do you want to keep running after gazillions of their bank accounts in Switzerland, and hope they run out of money, or kill the man who holds passwords for, probably, at least half of money for the regime?
And look at Norko... There are latest RolceRoyces on streets of Pyongyang.
>This is a 1 man regime, possibly 2-3-4 men regime.
It is gross oversimplification. It's basically political/special service elite (bound with personal loyalty) and thick layer of rent seekers (from oil & gas billionaires to countless bureaucratic sinecures).
Even if we assume that all power is indeed in hands of one person, who will gain power once he is killed and current system collapses? Ones who can act fast and are not hindered by too much reflection or morals: junta, blackshirts and organized crime.
>run out of money
No. Point is making desired behaviour more profitable than current behaviour for regime stakeholders. When risk coming from asset freeze becomes larger than risk from change in government - system will start to transform.
>holds passwords
That doesn't work that way. It's actually opposite - wealth is often spread among many loyal figureheads, with actual beneficiary holding nothing on his name.
>Norko
Russian regime is as far from classic totalitarian one as it is from european democracy. Probably even further, as it's basically democracy corrupted to the point of switching to new aggregate state.
When even secret police officers have to make a soup of their boots, it is.
> When risk coming from asset freeze becomes larger than risk from change in government - system will start to transform.
When the system will start to transform, he will get a bayonet in his pooper.
> That doesn't work that way. It's actually opposite - wealth is often spread among many loyal figureheads, with actual beneficiary holding nothing on his name.
This works this way. All corrupt heads of Ex-Union countries hold personal accounts on a very tight leash. Maybe with few figurehead titleholders, but not how you tell us.
Internet banking has made things much simpler for them.
> Probably even further, as it's basically democracy corrupted to the point of switching to new aggregate state.
>even secret police officers have to make a soup of their boots
So what are Usmanov, Prokhorov, Potanin, etc? Are they oppressed opposition, or are they eating boots too?
>bayonet in his pooper
While executions of government officials would be extremely entertaining and spirit raising sight, such revolutionary events will lead to much worse outcome in long term than reformation.
>All corrupt heads of Ex-Union countries hold personal accounts on a very tight leash
Ex-Union countries are very different. Claim that corrupt heads of 6M people/43G$ GDP Turkmenistan and 145M/4328G$ Russia are identical is a strong one. Other than size of economy, they are different in that most of them became authoritarian states right after gaining independence, while Russia had about decade of mostly working democracy.
>this
Elections. Corrupted to the point of uselessness, but they are still run, as government derives it's legitimacy from them, rather than from leader's charisma or ideology.
>Call things their their names
Sometimes it makes sense to distinguish between kinds of shit. Especially if shit is only material you have.
The problem with both EU and NATO is that some of the members have no problems being friendly with these regimes/terrorist states. They make good partners in business.
And you can see with open eyes that every top thread in this discussion is redirecting everyones attention to Snowden as if it's an excuse or even a comparable situation. Authoritarians have good propaganda engines.
If Democracy is to survive, we have to do better analysis.
big outrage from europe. makes sense. but were they also outraged when US diverted Bolivia’s presidential plane thinking Snowden was on board? can’t blame Belarus for thinking this is the norm
The best reaction from the West would be to release another persecuted journalist, Julian Assange, from his unlawful and unjust imprisonment. Then we could all condemn Belarus in good conscience.
Interesting how Western governments and the Media™ have attacked Belarus for diverting and grounding an airliner. Childish minds have forgotten when the US did the same thing, grounding Evo Morales' presidential jet and diverting it to Switzerland because they thought Edward Snowden was aboard. Thank you, USA for showing Belarus the way!
Most of these Western journalists function as intelligence operatives with instructions to foment coups in non-West aligned states such as China, Venezuela, Iran, Russia and Belarus.
The tech community is brilliant in some things but hopelessly naive in others.
It seems there is a positive correlation with intelligence and gullibility. I mean, you're so smart that you can program and count monies, this is because you are likely a modern day god which no one has figured out yet, and no mortal can fool your godly brain powers.
Also, people everywhere on television seem to agree with your views, confirms your godlike logical thinking powers. All hail moneys!
Let me bring in a story from the history. Plane of Bolivian president was forced to land in Viena in July 2013 in when it was suspected that Snowden is on the board after France and Portugal forbid it flying through their air space. I strongly belive that Russian propaganda will use that incident as a leverage.
To be clear, I highly despise the Belarusian regime and I'm in full support of opposition. I could only hope that EU will do something in return but it looks like it's a standard way of handling the people politically considered to be terrorists. It's not the way it should be done neither by Belarus nor especially by US/NATO if they want to hold the peacekeepers flag. Otherwise it's just double standards and politics.
The Belarus plane hijack is a small reminder why it's generally not a good idea to let governments know who is going to where. I'm not sure why governments that like to think of themselves as democratic don't see the risks.
-- Alexander Bochmann https://mastodon.infra.de/@galaxis/106285985254850170
I'd made a similar point following the assassination of Kim Jung-nam in 2017:
Travel and hospitality databases are widely accessible and shared amongst a tremendous number of organisations. State intelligence organisations might readily have access through their own state-run airline, or through private operations or plants within same. Similarly for terrorist, narco-criminal, money-laundering, or other organisations. Financial, banking, and payment-processing systems, only slightly less so. A P.I. license or position on a fraud or abuse desk at a major online retailer, or any skip-tracing agency, can have access to such information.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5ud243/data_ar...
What is your threat model?
Note that your own threat model may not include possibilities which put others at risk.
(In fairness, it appear that Protasevich was followed onto the plane itself, suggesting that in-flight availability of manifests played little role. The question of what pre-flight intelligence methods were employed remains open.)