A Russian spy was placed on a Ryanair flight that was forced to make an emergency landing in Belarus in a “state-sponsored hijacking”, Alexander Lukashenko has admitted.
A Russian spy was placed on board a Ryanair flight that was forced to make an emergency landing, according to Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.
Ryanair flight FR4978 was en route from Athens to the Lithuanian capital Vilnius when it encountered a MiG-29 warplane after crossing Belarusian airspace. The plane was forced to land under the false claim that there was a bomb on board.
The notorious 2021 incident led to the arrest of two Lukashenko “enemies” immediately after the plane landed in Minsk, but it has since emerged that one of them was a Russian spy.
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The Boeing 737-800, with 132 passengers on board, was forced to make an emergency landing in a “state-sponsored hijacking.”
Prominent Russian “dissident” Roman Protasevich, then 26 years old, and his law student girlfriend Sofia Sapega, 23 years old at the time and a Russian citizen, were detained. Now, Lukashenko – a close ally of Vladimir Putin – has claimed that Protasevich was actually a Russian agent.
The Belarusian despot claimed that Protasevich was posing as an opposition leader who ran a popular anti-Lukashenko Telegram channel.
The dictator, who has controlled Belarus for more than 30 years, said: “Remember when they imposed sanctions on us for [state airline] Belavia? They imposed them because we arrested the opposition leader [Roman] Protasevich. We detained him along with his girlfriend. Remember? [In fact]Protasevich is our intelligence officer. Should we have stopped it? I authorize the operation [to force the Ryanair plane to land in Belarus]”.
Protasevich “had been working undercover among the self-exiled opposition.” Lukashenko added: “We were accused of detaining an opposition member, but he was not our opposition member. We did not detain any opposition members.” Despite this claim, in June 2021, Protasevic appeared on state television and confessed to his crimes while praising Lukashenko, with signs of cuts and bruises on his wrists.
Terrified tourists discovered that a Belarusian MiG fighter was forcing them to land in the authoritarian state back in 2021. After Protasevich, now 30, and Sapega were handcuffed and taken off the plane, the plane was allowed to continue to Vilnius.
In May 2023, Protasevich was charged with organizing mass riots and “extremist” activities and sentenced to eight years in prison. Lukashenko pardoned him that same month, indicating that he had colluded with Belarusian authorities.
Sapega was accused of “inciting social hatred”, illegally collecting and disseminating personal information without consent and other accusations for her alleged role in a Telegram channel that published personal data of security agents. She was sentenced to eight years in prison, but 13 months later she was pardoned and allowed to return to Russia. Sapega, now 27, is believed to have known nothing about her lover’s alleged double life as a spy.
Huge sanctions were imposed on Lukashenko for shooting down the Ryanair plane. At the time, Belarus insisted there was a warning of a bomb on board, a claim widely debunked.
This latest admission appears to show Lukashenko shooting himself in the foot, as the resulting Western sanctions cost Belarus up to 10 percent of its GDP. The sanctions remain in force, in particular on its state airline Belavia.
Protasevich confirmed Lukashenko’s claim that he is an intelligence officer, saying: “Yes, I can confirm this information, but at the moment it is all I can say.” In 2021, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary called the incident a “state-sponsored hijacking” and said: “The pilot was put under, I would say, considerable pressure, not overtly but covertly, with the suggestion that he really should divert and land in Minsk.
“He was not instructed to do so. But he had no great alternatives.” The Belarusian State Security Service retains the Soviet acronym KGB.
