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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 for

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.

emn13 5y ago
Evo Morales's plane was not forced to land in Vienna; it chose to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident 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/evo-morales-controversial-flight-over-europe-minute-by-heavily-disputed-minute/ 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.
- vkou 5y ago
  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.
  - emn13 5y ago
    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.
    - vkou 5y ago
      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?
      - joshuamorton 5y ago
        > can deny an in-flight commercial airplane access to their airspace to make a political arrest. They clearly can, and did. I think GP has done a fabulous job explaining why this isn't true, so your continued assertions that it is are strange. Perhaps there are differences between these two circumstances after all?
altcognito 5y ago
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.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  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.
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    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. [0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-medias-double-standard https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-medias-double-sta...
    - thodin 5y ago
      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.
csomar 5y ago
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.
aus-lander 5y ago
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.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  > 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.
achikin 5y ago
What Russia has to do with this incident?
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  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.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/europe/ryanair-belarus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/europe/ryanair-bela...
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    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.
- V-2 5y ago
  There is no way Belarus would have gone ahead with something of this magnitude without Kremlin's backing. Russia benefits politically, too - sanctions will be imposed by the West now, driving Belarus closer to Russia.
kergonath 5y ago
Tuer is a difference between closing an airspace and re-routing a plane with a fighter jet. Not that it was right, but still quite a difference.
- caf 5y ago
  There is zero difference, because closed airspace will ultimately be enforced at the point of a fighter jet.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Closing an airspace is re-routing with the implicit threat of a fighter jet.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      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.
dzhiurgis 5y ago
This is almost exactly how Apple TV series Tehran starts - even couple of Mossad(instead of KGB) agents on the plane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4BxH619YlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4BxH619YlU
- lenitabinol 5y ago
  This is what came to my mind. Sinister tactics but apparently very effective given airline policy.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    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...
    - Dah00n 5y ago
      Which is which?
      - postsantum 5y ago
        That's not always obvious. Luckily, we have a lot of movies showing us the difference between goodies and baddies
        itsyaboi 5y ago
        It's a good thing we have Hollywood to help us calibrate our moral compasses!
        Dah00n 5y ago
        Yeah, look at Hollywood and calibrate to the opposite!
        5y ago
rudnevr 5y ago
yep, that's what they do. "whatabout Morales plane" all over Russian internet.

emn13 5y ago

Evo Morales's plane was not forced to land in Vienna; it chose to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident 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/evo-morales-controversial-flight-over-europe-minute-by-heavily-disputed-minute/ 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.

vkou 5y ago
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.
- emn13 5y ago
  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.
  - vkou 5y ago
    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?
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > can deny an in-flight commercial airplane access to their airspace to make a political arrest. They clearly can, and did. I think GP has done a fabulous job explaining why this isn't true, so your continued assertions that it is are strange. Perhaps there are differences between these two circumstances after all?

altcognito 5y ago

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.

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
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.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  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. [0] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-medias-double-standard https://greenwald.substack.com/p/corporate-medias-double-sta...
  - thodin 5y ago
    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.

csomar 5y ago

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.

aus-lander 5y ago

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.

stickfigure 5y ago
> 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.

achikin 5y ago

What Russia has to do with this incident?

dredmorbius 5y ago
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.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/europe/ryanair-belarus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/world/europe/ryanair-bela...
- PeterisP 5y ago
  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.
V-2 5y ago
There is no way Belarus would have gone ahead with something of this magnitude without Kremlin's backing. Russia benefits politically, too - sanctions will be imposed by the West now, driving Belarus closer to Russia.

kergonath 5y ago

Tuer is a difference between closing an airspace and re-routing a plane with a fighter jet. Not that it was right, but still quite a difference.

caf 5y ago
There is zero difference, because closed airspace will ultimately be enforced at the point of a fighter jet.
whimsicalism 5y ago
Closing an airspace is re-routing with the implicit threat of a fighter jet.
- kergonath 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    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.

dzhiurgis 5y ago

This is almost exactly how Apple TV series Tehran starts - even couple of Mossad(instead of KGB) agents on the plane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4BxH619YlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4BxH619YlU

lenitabinol 5y ago
This is what came to my mind. Sinister tactics but apparently very effective given airline policy.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago
  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...
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    Which is which?
    - postsantum 5y ago
      That's not always obvious. Luckily, we have a lot of movies showing us the difference between goodies and baddies
      - itsyaboi 5y ago
        It's a good thing we have Hollywood to help us calibrate our moral compasses!
        Dah00n 5y ago
        Yeah, look at Hollywood and calibrate to the opposite!
        5y ago

rudnevr 5y ago

yep, that's what they do. "whatabout Morales plane" all over Russian internet.