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How the EU Should Respond to the Belarus Plane Crisis

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01/06/2021

How the EU Should Respond to the Belarus Plane Crisis

Three questions to Ryhor Astapenia

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How the EU Should Respond to the Belarus Plane Crisis

Ryhor Astapenia

Director of the Belarus Initiative at Chatham House

On May 24, the Belarusian government ordered the emergency landing of a Ryanair flight to Vilnius, Lithuania, because of an alleged bomb threat. 26-year old Belarusian opposition journalist Roman Protasevich was arrested upon landing in Minsk and is now being held by the authorities. The events have brought international attention to Belarus and its president, Alexander Lukashenko. The EU responded by imposing a new sway of sanctions. We spoke to Dr. Ryhor Astapenia, Director of the Belarus Initiative at Chatham House, to understand what was happening in Belarus and what more the EU could do to help.

The Belarusian government’s arrest of Roman Protasevich on May 24 sparked widespread international outcry. Have similar arrests happened before? What has been the government's approach to dealing with public dissent?

Many unprecedented events have happened in Belarus since the Presidential election in August 2020 which many consider a stolen election or even as a sham. More than 400 people are recognized as political prisoners by Human Rights defenders, around 30,000 citizens were detained at some point, thousands were tortured, and several were murdered. Political repression is now widespread in the country.

But the hijacking of the Ryanair flight and the later arrests of Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega, a Russian citizen, is really unique. On May 23, Alexander Lukashenka crossed a new red line. On top of the assaults he inflicted on his own people, he added a critical question: whether a dictator can hijack an international flight without paying any price by claiming there was a bomb on board. All of this to arrest a political opponent.

Alexander Lukashenka has shown that he is confident in his actions, that he is able to divert an international airplane to repress Belarusians - which he believed would play out with total impunity. Actually, he did not anticipate such a rapid response from the EU or that in just a few days, the Union would apply restrictions on Belarusian airspace.

The European Council was quick to condemn the arrest and impose sanctions. What do you think about the EU’s response?

A sustained reliance on sanctions by the EU in Belarus could lead to a situation like Syria, where the marginalization of Bashar al-Assad did not prevent the destruction of the country.

The Western reaction is absolutely logical. Alexander Lukashenka ordered the hijacking of a plane that was flying from Athens to Vilnius, two EU capitals: the EU had to take drastic measures. The EU might feel like it has done enough, but there’s a risk that the Union is relying too much on sanctions that will eventually harm the Belarusian society as much as Lukashenka. It is complicated to come up with sanctions that only weaken the president. But any sanction on the ruler that runs the risk of rippling on the country’s society should be compensated by showing that the "West" cares about the safety of Belarussian citizens - for example, by lowering the cost of visas issued to Belarusians to come work and live in Europe.

A sustained reliance on sanctions by the EU in Belarus could lead to a situation like Syria, where the marginalization of Bashar al-Assad did not prevent the destruction of the country. The EU should show that it is concerned by the authoritarianism of the Belarusian ruler, as well as the well-being of the society, to which Lukashenka is a real threat.

The European response to the hijacking was welcomed by the Belarusian opposition, as the Belarusian democratic movement had been calling for more action against Lukashenka for a long time. The EU has been slow to implement clear sanctions against the government since the election in August 2020. Consensus is mandatory inside the EU in order for it to adopt a stance against a country. Because some European countries share interests with Belarus, it has become complicated to come up with a unanimous response and speak with one voice. This explains in part why the list of sanctions until the plane hijacking was so short. Rather than target major enterprises and actors, measures only focused on companies that did not have much to lose.

What more could the EU do when dealing with Belarus in future? Is there anything it should avoid?

The EU should create a specific task force responsible for coming up with a clear answer to the Belarusian crisis in order to avoid reaching a dead-end. Today, there is no unified stance, because no one is clearly responsible for finding a way out of the crisis. Rather, each country is only doing it part-time. As a result, the EU’s stance is weak, if not vague.

There are also countries that don’t feel directly impacted by the issue, while countries like Lithuania and Poland are significantly more involved, perhaps because of the geographic proximity. It also remains complicated to come up with concrete actions that will directly affect Alexander Lukashenka. For instance, the tobacco industry and the smuggling of cigarettes in Europe brings massive cash flows into the country. Valuable information and intelligence on relevant economic sectors is paramount to the imposition of sanctions that will affect the countries’ authorities the most.

The EU should create a specific task force responsible for coming up with a clear answer to the Belarusian crisis in order to avoid reaching a dead-end.

As mentioned before, the EU needs to support Belarus’s society and media, the first victims of repression right now. Two weeks ago, Tut.by, the largest news media outlet in the country, was banned and its three hundred employees were discredited. Some journalists were even imprisoned and their bank accounts frozen. This is just an example of why the EU should assist the Belarusian civil society.

As for Belarus’s links to Russia, EU officials should have in mind that although their sanctions push Alexander Lukashenka towards Vladimir Putin, the former still remains a burden to the Russian President. Indeed, even if Lukashenka is one of Putin’s (perhaps only) allies in the region, supporting the Belarusian authoritarian ruler poses a significant cost to the Kremlin, at a time when the Russian government purse is already tight. The EU should not be paralyzed by the potential Russian answer to their measures.

In order to look forward and beyond the authoritarian rule of Lukashenka, the EU should consider long term commitments, whether political, economic and financial, to the Belarusian people. This pledge to help the country implement reforms could reassure the country’s society of European support and extensively imagine the country’s reconstruction.

Copyright: Wojtek RADWANSKI / AFP

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