Sky Pirates

“Europe’s last dictator,” as Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko is not-so-affectionately known, was front page news Monday.

The country’s bonds dove amid a furious international backlash following a comically brazen operation to detain a dissident, Roman Protasevich. Yields on dollar-denominated 2031 notes jumped more than 50bps while those on notes due in 2023 rose almost 100bps.

Protasevich — a journalist with a popular Telegram channel — was in Belarusian air space aboard a Ryanair flight from Athens to Lithuania, when air traffic controllers concocted a bomb threat. Lukashenko then dispatched a fighter jet to (basically) hijack the plane and divert it to Minsk. There were 170 passengers on board.

Protasevich founded and edited a “conduit for Lukashenko’s foes to share information and organize demonstrations against the government,” The New York Times wrote, adding that,

He fled the country in 2019, fearing arrest. But he has continued to roil Lukashenko’s regime while living in exile in Lithuania, so much so that he was charged in November with inciting public disorder and social hatred.

As a teenager, Protasevich became a dissident, first drawing scrutiny from law enforcement. He was expelled from a prestigious school for participating in a protest rally in 2011 and later was expelled from the journalism program of the Minsk State University.

Lukashenko, who survived as strongman last year after a clumsily rigged election produced a wave of mass protests, was almost universally decried.

“Almost” because the Kremlin predictably cheered the patently inexcusable arrest. “Formally, there was a bomb threat, so everything was done properly,” one Russian lawmaker told Bloomberg. “I don’t see anything unacceptable in the actions of the Belarusian authorities.”

Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry and a masterful (if somewhat cartoonish) propagandist, conjured a series of false equivalencies in a Facebook post defending Lukashenko. (Why she’s still allowed on Facebook is anyone’s guess.)

RT’s editor said “I never thought I’d envy Belarus in any way, but the Old Man performed beautifully.” Note that countless day-traders and netizens who spend their time immersed in financial commentary still read content produced by arm’s-length, pseudo-surrogates of RT and its cousin, Sputnik, possibly without realizing it.

Another Russian lawmaker called Lukashenko’s gambit a “brilliant special operation.”

You can draw your own conclusions and I’d be lying to you if I claimed to have anything other than a passing interest in this story. But from the perspective of a (mostly) disinterested political scientist, Russia and its surrogates spent the last 36 hours publicly defending an action that’s tantamount to state-sponsored terrorism.

Ask yourself this: How would you feel today reading Russia’s spin if one of your loved ones was among the 170 people on that plane when Lukashenko ordered it intercepted by a MiG-29?

To be sure, Lukashenko’s gamble could prove costly. This was especially egregious and it’s being treated as such. Dominic Raab demanded Protasevich’s release “immediately,” calling Lukashenko’s actions “outlandish.” The UK promised “a coordinated response.”

“[It’ll] be interesting to see whether they go beyond sanctions against individuals this time,” said Aberdeen’s Viktor Szabo. Those sanctions “haven’t really been effective in the last few years.”

It’s possible, although not likely, that the EU could suspend flights by European airlines over Belarus and ban all ground transit with the country.

“In a world in which legal remits for some countries already run globally, those who fall foul of them are aware where they can no longer visit, and which airlines they should not fly. Now they may have to consider which airspace they can’t fly through,” Rabobank’s Michael Every wrote Monday, before asking “What if the airspace is disputed, as over the South China Sea?”

Unfortunately (for Lukashenko) some US citizens may have been in harm’s way. Antony Blinken called the incident “shocking” and denounced the “ongoing harassment and arbitrary detention of journalists.” This comes just days after multiple media outlets reported that the Trump administration sought, and obtained, phone records of reporters for CNN and The Washington Post.

Blinken called for the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization to review the incident.

Commenting further Monday, Rabo’s Every said Lukashenko’s action “risks massive geopolitical/economic tensions unless it’s immediately condemned by all countries, and the blogger freed.”

Of course, considering all of the other passengers were ultimately unharmed (physically, anyway), one might plausibly ask whether this is worse than Mohammed bin Salman’s extrajudicial execution of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Kingdom’s Istanbul consulate. If Zakharova was looking for real parallels, she should have cited America’s ongoing support for Riyadh.