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‘Bomb Threat' That Justified Belarus Hijacking Came 24 Minutes After
- kungito 5y agoIs there a not paywalled version?
- axiosgunnar 5y agoThe „excuse“ to hijack is probably bad on purpose, to add insult to injury. Same goes for chosing a name of Jewish orgin (Ahmed Yurlanov) as the alledged sender of the bomb threat. It‘s done basically to tease the EU, saying „look at how obviously fake our pretense to hijack your plane was, and you still won‘t do anything about it!“ Same story with the two Russian agents who murdered Skripal in the UK. When they were found on security cams walking around the cathedral (where Skripal was later murdered at) and questioned, they said they were a gay couple (from Russia of all places!) that were just on a touristic visit. They even cited that the cathedral is one if the most special because it‘s tower is built in a special way, ridiculous. Again, it‘s adding insult to injury.
- misja111 5y agoI thought the same at the time. Also the way they tried to murder Skripal, same like they did earlier with Alexander Litvinenko: by poisoning with Polonium. They could have chosen many other ways which would look less spectacular and wouldn't put the suspicion so obviously on Russia. But obviously it was there intention that it was clear that they were behind it: both to scare any remaining dissidents and to impress some part of the Russian population with their power.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoSkripal was poisoned with Novichok, not polonium.
- kspacewalk2 5y agoIf you don't actually know you're looking for a radioactive substance, poisoning someone with polonium might not be so "in your face" after all. They may have been going off previous successes (which, by definition, we wouldn't know about).
- jtylr 5y agoJust to clarify, Sergei Skripal is still alive, the assassination failed but instead did kill an unrelated woman later named Dawn Sturgess.
- cookieswumchorr 5y agoi'm going with Hanlon's razor here
- proxysna 5y agoThis exactly how it is. The way they covered up murders during protests is very descriptive of their ability to do such things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alexander_Taraikovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alexander_Taraikovsky
- ceejayoz 5y agoSurely Hanlon's "don't assume malice" falls down a bit in state sponsored assassinations?
- 88 5y agoYes, but when the question is whether they’re deliberately giving the impression they’re incompetent to add insult to injury, I’m inclined to assume they’re just plain incompetent.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoBut they do that a lot in other contexts, like using novichok agents or traceable radioisotopes for state assassinations, then 'denying' it was them.
- cookieswumchorr 5y agoi mean the "getting caught out of own incompetence" part of course. a recent example was Navalny's call to his poisoner from the FSB. This was obviously NOT an intended leak
- pydry 5y ago>When they were found on security cams walking around the cathedral (where Skripal was later murdered at) and questioned, they said they were a gay couple (from Russia of all places!) that were just on a touristic visit. From what I remember Russia suggested that they might have been a gay couple, a claim which they rebutted almost more fervently than they did the claim that they were spies. I figured at the time that along with the cringey interview they did were probably both punishments for being shit at their job. >They even cited that the cathedral is one if the most special because it‘s tower is built in a special way, ridiculous. It is a decent cathedral to be fair. Salisbury is very much the kind of place that appeals to Russians - hence why Skripal retired there.
- jen20 5y ago> Salisbury is very much the kind of place that appeals to Russians Why? I lived not very far from Salisbury for much of my adult life and rarely encountered Russians.
- pydry 5y agoRussians have a thing for quintessential English chic things. It's the rosy image of the country from old Soviet English language textbooks coming to life. It's a poor country and the UK makes it very hard to get a visa. Many more would come if it were easier. I'm from not too far away also and to be honest Salisbury bores the hell out of me.
- bitcurious 5y ago> Same goes for chosing a name of Jewish orgin (Ahmed Yurlanov) as the alledged sender of the bomb threat. Ahmed is Arabic, while Yurlanov is a generic Slavic name. I think the intent was to communicate Chechen not Jewish.
- proxysna 5y agoNot generic slavic surname at all but central asian/caucasus origin. Other than that you are right.
- lixtra 5y ago> It‘s done basically to tease the EU, saying „look at how obviously fake our pretense to hijack your plane was, and you still won‘t do anything about it!“ At least EU closed their airspace. https://mobile.twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1397520537929371648 https://mobile.twitter.com/flightradar24/status/139752053792...
- zkid18 5y agoAhmed Yurlanov is sounds more like a Chechen or Ingush name.
- proxysna 5y agoRussian spies and their coverups != Belarussian KGB\OAC and their coverups. Russians have the ability act bold on purpose because of their oil and money. They have a massive propaganda machine that will scream all kinds of bs in all directions. Paid politicians all over the world will also side with Russia. Belarus, does not have that kind of leverage. They have no propaganda machine to create coverups and have to act sneaky. Like with Pavel Sheremet's murder [3] in Ukraine, they organized it well enough to avoid detection up until 2021. Or a Minsk metro bombing [5] where they just grabbed some dudes and executed them not even a year later. They often fail ofc. They failed with a cover up of Alexander Taraikovsky's [0] murder and later with Raman Bondarenko's [1]. How they failed with staging a coup attempt with russian PMC soldiers shortly before the election[2] and released all "terrorists" a few months later without any punishment or comments [6]. Do not over sophisticate these people. Belarusian KGB today, in general, is not what it used to be even 20 years ago. Times of people dissapearing into thin air (Zaharenko, Zavadski, Gonchar to name a few [4]) are gone, just like most of the people who were able to pull off stuff like that. Today's state of it is due to negative selection where the most loyal get to the top, and not the most talented or capable. [0] https://voicesfrombelarus.medium.com/what-we-know-about-the-death-of-taraykovskiy-c9de1d6dfd72 https://voicesfrombelarus.medium.com/what-we-know-about-the-... [1] https://www.rferl.org/a/belarus-bandarenka-lukashenka/31169120.html https://www.rferl.org/a/belarus-bandarenka-lukashenka/311691... [2] https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-diplomats-meet-detained-vagner-contractors-in-minsk-jail/30761549.html https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-diplomats-meet-detained-vagn... [3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-belarus-journalist-idUSKBN2991L6 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-belarus-journalis... [4] https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/120000/eur490132002en.pdf https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/120000/eur4901320... [5] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/minsk-bombers-executed-questions-that-remain/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/minsk-bombers-executed-... [6] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/world/europe/belarus-russian-mercenaries-wagner.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/world/europe/belarus-russ...
- vasac 5y agoYour narrative about Russian PMC staging coup attempt (link 2) isn't true. That was failed SBU operation. http://euromaidanpress.com/2021/02/12/the-wagner-affair-in-belarus-and-its-implications-for-ukraine/ http://euromaidanpress.com/2021/02/12/the-wagner-affair-in-b...
- baybal2 5y ago> Again, it‘s adding insult to injury. I think, here it is a case of overestimating their intelligence level. Goondas running ex-USSR states are polar opposites of Western stereotype of "brilliant villains." For example Putin is said to be comically bad with arithmetics. Nasarbayev's verbal eloquence is so poor that regime lieutenants themselves often go on censoring him. Belarusian KGBs probably don't even know from where that Hamas comes from. I'd say "shrewd, yes — smart, no" but the saying also goes "Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil."
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throw14082020 5y agoSkripal is not dead?
- jen20 5y agoNo. He recovered from the poisoning.
- h2odragon 5y ago"Russia is poisoning people with Novichok" is this lovely meme that everyone seems to accept as Gospel; doesn't it seem they'd have had more success, at least? The targets and the evidence and the circumstances surrounding these incidents aren't as clear cut as the common interpretation, I think. "Novichok" is a great boogeyman; no one's ever seen any but apparently everyone knows what it is, anyway.
- DangerousPie 5y agoJust because they're bad at it doesn't mean they aren't doing it. And that's assuming their intent is actually to kill, and not to just send a message.
- mthoms 5y ago>no one's ever seen any but apparently everyone knows what it is, anyway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent#History_and_disclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok_agent#History_and_dis...
- bwilli123 5y agohttps://twitter.com/MoonofA/status/1397863844740055052 https://twitter.com/MoonofA/status/1397863844740055052
- bwilli123 5y agoLikely a timezone issue. Protonmail is in Switzerland (GMT+2) Minsk is (GMT+3) but could also depend on server clock setting on either side.
- maratc 5y agoProtonmail confirms[0] mail was sent after the plane was diverted. [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/email-bomb-threat-sent-after-bloggers-plane-was-diverted-over-belarus-swiss-2021-05-27/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/email-bomb-threat-sent-...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gcbirzan 5y agoThat makes no sense. Aside the confirmation from protonmail of the timestamp, that's not the proton mail UI, so it's at the destination. The timestamp says "Sunday 23...", so it's way more likely to be in the local timezone.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- diimdeep 5y agoIMHO regimes like in Belarus or Turkmenistan is so dysfunctional and live in delusional bubble, they generate quality comedy material for outside world, we don't need sketchy spy or political satire anymore, just read the news.
- SignalNotSecure 5y agoThey aren't dysfunctional in the sense you imagine. Their state is fighting for survival in the face of foreign agents and interference. They are in a weak position to defend themselves so you see them lashing out in less subtle ways. Civilians are unfortunately caught in the crossfire.
- rsynnott 5y agoAlso, er, fighting for survival against its own people.
- SignalNotSecure 5y agoCorrect
- baybal2 5y ago> Civilians are unfortunately caught in the crossfire. Not a crossfire, but a very directed one. It's critical to such regimes to never let anything the West does happen without it hitting their own civilians. If the population see Western sanctions benefiting them, and visibly harming the regime, people will be ready to take bigger sacrifices, knowing that the regime will loose much more than they do. It is equally critical for the West to communicate loud, and clear to Belarusian people that they are doing those actions to support their resistance, and not just because they want to hit Lukasenka.
- CaptainZapp 5y agoWhile I don't disagree with you the key sentence is "outside world". If you happen to live in the "inside world" of such despicable excuses of human trash then the situation is rather less funny.
- ibaikov 5y agodel
- gcbirzan 5y agoThe logs of what emails were sent is probably stored by the email servers, as well as, probably, metadata about when emails were sent, if not to whom, is stored in the db unencrypted.
- maratc 5y agoI guess it needs to store your mails to show them to you. This includes your sent mails so protonmail can show them to you in your "sent" view.
- gcbirzan 5y agoThe claim is that they only store emails encrypted with a key for which they don't have the password.
- mschuster91 5y agoThe content of the email may be encrypted, the metadata by definition cannot be. If the people orchestrating this "bomb threat" only sent out one or two emails, it's trivial for the email hoster to check the send timestamps of these.
- gcbirzan 5y agoYeah, mentioned this in another commentm, at least SOME metadata is needed, in particular the date, so you know how to sort them. I see that you can search by sender for received messages (not a big proton user), so I guess it does store that unencrpyted as well
- kalnins 5y agoNot necessarily. You can encrypt the search value clientside and search by value in its encrypted form.
- cbm-vic-20 5y agoWow, they must of had a really good model that could predict a bomb threat that far in advance!
- adontz 5y agoI think Lukashenko just gave us moral right to treat himself as a Hamas leader. Not that I see much moral difference between them, he is known for torturing and raping Belarusian citizens in prisons.
- draw_down 5y agoFlagged the story after seeing this comment. We don’t need to be electing new leaders for Hamas on HN.
- unchocked 5y agoKid in high school did this - called in a bomb threat _after_ getting his parents to excuse him from school for the bomb threat. Cheeseball dictators end up like disturbed high school boys.
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.md/843S6 https://archive.md/843S6
- anotheryou 5y agoamateurs XD
- CaptainZapp 5y agoA good friend of mine left Czecheslovakia in 1968 to study in Switzerland. After Russia "liberated" the country[1] citizens living abroad were ordered back to the motherland. For him this was a really tough decision, since people who refused were criminalized and he would have faced jail if he returned to the country. He told me that whenever he went from Zurich to Vienna he took the train, which takes 9 - 12 hours compared to the flight, which takes roughly an hour. His reasoning was that if the plane, for whatever reason, is diverted to Bratislava he would be truely and royally fucked. At the time he told me the story I thought he was a bit paranoid. Looking at what happened in Belarus I'm no more so sure. And he was just a potential convict not a prominent disident. Thankfully he could return after the velvet revolution[2] and he now lives in Prague. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pact_invasion_of_Czechoslovakia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pact_invasion_of_Czecho... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velvet_Revolution
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoIn this case, though, the flight from Greece to Lithuania went directly over Belarus. If I were Roman Protasevich, I would definitely not want to fly in the airspace of the country that wanted to get me. There is no path from Zurich to Vienna that flies over Czech airspace. Furthermore, during the Cold War an act of a Warsaw Pact country hijacking a Nato country's plane over Nato airspace would have very likely led to something at least as bad as the Cuban Missile Crisis, if not WWIII.
- CaptainZapp 5y agoHijacking the plane was not really a tought. But what happens if Vienna airport needs to close its runways (say it's blocked by a broken plane or an accident) and the plane needs to be diverted? Bratislava is just 55km from Vienna. It's an obvious choice if the plane needs to divert to a different airport. It's not an unreasonable fear.
- dmix 5y agoReminds me of this story which had a great documentary but extremely sad ending of 7 young people trying to flee communist Georgia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_6833 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_6833 Here is the documentary by a local Georgian director that stuck in my head for a long time: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0818087/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0818087/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUkluq8oPvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUkluq8oPvY These were kids of the Georgian intelligentsia, including trained doctors, painters, and an actor, doing something naive and stupid (hijacking a plane to go to the nearest capitalist country). It turned out even the pilots were armed, shot at them, and turned the flight right back to Georgia. The head of local KGB then got Georgian soldiers to shoot up the plane "so it wouldn't leave", killing the pilots "by accident" and injuring innocent passengers. The plane was then raided by Soviet Alpha group (basically their US Delta Force). The communist leader of Georgia at the time wanted to make an example of them and gave death sentences, even despite their ages, except of course the one girl got 15yrs. The parents didn't find out they were executed by the state for five years (nor did the media obviously). The desire to leave the Iron Curtain countries lead to some crazy stories and near suicidal attempts. And these stories were quickly forgotten.
- mzs 5y agoa thread with more highlights: https://twitter.com/badc0fee/status/1397939894077505546 https://twitter.com/badc0fee/status/1397939894077505546
- OldGoodNewBad 5y agoWho really cares? Didn’t the CIA force the Peruvian President’s plane to land in Austria to look for Assange? That’s a precedent. Nations have every right to defend themselves from subversion. And this fella’s so obvious in his subversion that he has CIA money bursting from his pockets and has a big giant neon hat that says OPEN SOCIETY SOROS SUBVERTER on it too.
- TheGigaChad 5y agoHey, how are the rats on board the Kursk doing?
- scatters 5y agoThe plane in that incident was not forced down; it was denied entry to NATO airspace. If Assange had been on board, it had more than enough fuel to make it back to Moscow. Landing in Austria was a political stunt.
- OldGoodNewBad 5y agoJust saying I can’t get too excited over Belarus arresting a spy on a subversion mission even if it involves forcing a plane down.
- alephnan 5y ago> Leaving aside the fact that Hamas isn’t for blowing up commercial airliners, the identity it chose for a Hamas representative was bizarre. Ahmed Yurlanov?
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoFor anyone still lusting to start bombing Belarus into compliance, Russia announced that any European Union flight that avoids Belarus airspace is prohibited from entering Russian airspace. Belarus and Russia are connected at the hip. Don't backdoor us into a nuclear holocaust because you think this is Libya or the Balkans. There are very dangerous escalations possible here if we're not careful. Are you really willing to kill thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions over this issue? Belarus might as well be Russia in this situation. Would you advocate for bombing Russia over something similar? If not, learn more about the relationship between Russia and Belarus before pushing us for a course of action that could quickly get out of hand.
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- Mountain_Skies 5y agoIt's good manners to refute posts instead of downvoting based on what you wish was or was not true.
- alephnan 5y agoIt seems HN has been downtrending ( no pun intended ) this way. This pattern is evident in posts criticizing the social justice climate dominating tech. Meanwhile, ad hominem attacks against Donald Trump are tolerated and even encouraged ( my very post here suggesting that ad hominem attacks are a logical fallacy would likely be downvoted without refutation, only further proving the point )