This and more: ground all flights in and out until the journalist is released.

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.

There's a train between Belarus and Kaliningrad going thru Lithuania.

Detain every single passenger for rest of the year.

Better still, only detain connected people from Belarus.

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.

At some point, it doesn't matter.

Qatar was doing massive detours a couple of years ago to keep flying (of course money wasn't an issue for them)

But detouring Bielorussia might be even cheaper than forced landings, who knows.

Who would want to fly over Belarus now?

I have no problem flying over there, lol

Probably lots of other individual people too. Perhaps the bigger question is which airlines would want to.

Unless Ryanair's reputation takes a big hit, I'm guessing the answer is all of them.

For the specific flight in question that would've been around 60km or 5 minute detour.