President’s Office calls Ryanair landing a display of international terrorism

The Office of the President called the air incident in Belarus with the Athens-Vilnius flight a direct manifestation of international terrorism.

The adviser to the OP head Mykhailo Podolyak stated it, Ukrainska Pravda reports.

"Forcing a passenger plane to land in Minsk under the falsified pretext of 'bombing' and under the convoy of military aircraft is an unconditional challenge to the modern world. 

It's also obvious that this fantastic act of cynicism and sophistication of the current Belarusian state requires a strict legal assessment. At the very least, it can be a 'ban on the sky,' the isolation of the country from direct communication with the civilized world. Optimally, direct personal sanctions against the authors of this Jesuit scenario. The key here is that such actions clearly break the accepted rules of conduct and create deadly precedents.

It's clear that official Minsk is indifferent to its own reputation, and therefore there are few ways of influence, only isolation, and only significant financial and trade restrictions. It's also clear that if such an incident with the forcible coercion of a foreign passenger airliner for unmotivated landing occurred in a free country, the consequences would be much more severe. Until the expulsion from adequate interstate communication…

However, I'd especially like to mention another important aspect of this story. As a result of this operation, Lukashenko himself, and Belarus as a whole, finally moved into the category of maximum toxicity. No more compromise exit from the protracted political crisis with the participation of European mediators is possible. The only way for Lukashenko is to finally dissolve his country in Russia. Based on the event's ultimate price, the key organizer and beneficiary of the forced landing is the Russian Federation.

Moreover, it's now quite obvious that Russia was preparing something similar for Ukraine. In the form of a non-existent 'special operation' with exactly the same coercive scenario and further maximum discrediting of our country as some of our 'useful,' so to speak, media entities still sincerely regret about," Podoliak said.

To recap, a Ryanair plane flying from Athens to Vilnius landed at Minsk National Airport in Minsk; the pilots gave an alarm because they received a message about a bomb on board.

A sapper service arrived at the airport but didn't find any explosive devices.

Opposition journalist Roman Protasevych was arrested at the time.