He said Belarus had acted outrageously but perhaps not illegally. He told me that Belarus’s main legal obligations come from the 1944 agreement known as the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation. J ohn Byerly retired after 30 years at the State Department, where he served as an aviation lawyer and principal aviation negotiator. In the future, if the Belarus ruse is allowed to stand, the experience will come to resemble taking a train, with all the terrestrial legal risk that entails. Flying over a foreign country has, until now, felt to most people like teleporting past it-as if remaining tens of thousands of feet above hostile territory, we are not in some important sense in it, and vulnerable to being forced down and arrested. Even in the absence of such developments, however, the world has changed in disturbing ways. If Hamas and Belarus have invented clairvoyance and time travel, the national security implications for the United States and others will be considerable. The Daily Beast and Newlines noted another inconsistency: The bomb threat arrived 24 minutes after the Minsk control tower radioed to the Ryanair flight crew. The Ryanair flight may have carried a few stragglers, but to plant a bomb a week later would be like trying to pull off a Christmas attack on January 2. Most of the foreigners appeared remotely, and the few who appeared in person, including myself, flew home when the forum concluded more than a week before the Belarus incident. Hamas’s purported email specifically noted the intention to kill participants in the Delphi Economic Forum, a Davos-like public-policy event in Athens. Belarus claims that Hamas emailed to inform Minsk National Airport that it intended to bomb a flight if the European Union did not “abandon its support for Israel in its war” in Gaza. But the Ryanair incident was nevertheless diabolical-and what makes it particularly diabolical is that Belarus may have managed to pull it off without violating its agreements under international law.Īnne Applebaum: Other regimes will hijack planes too Technically, you have to be on a plane to hijack it. Ryanair’s CEO called the incident “state-sponsored hijacking.” It was not. The rest continued on to Vilnius, except for a handful who preferred to stay in Minsk, possibly to sightsee, possibly because they were Belarussian operatives planted on the flight to supervise the arrest. Minutes later, the Ryanair plane landed, and Belarussian authorities arrested two passengers: Roman Protasevich, a Belarussian dissident, and his Russian girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. “We recommend you to land.” A Belarussian MiG fighter jet showed up on Ryanair’s wing to emphasize the recommendation. “You have bomb on board,” the controller said. O n Sunday, Ryanair Flight 4978 was traveling over Belarussian airspace from Athens to Vilnius when Minsk air-traffic control delivered alarming news.
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