DISINFO: The Ryanair incident was a European provocation
SUMMARY
The airplane incident in Belarus with the Irish company Ryanair was orchestrated by the European Union to vilify Belarus.
RESPONSE
Disinformation narrative about the forced landing of Ryanair Flight 4978 by Belarusian authorities in May 2021 in order to detain Belarusian dissident Raman Pratasevich.
Ryanair flight 4978, which is a regular flight from Athens to Vilnius, was in Belarusian airspace when Belarusian authorities diverted it to land in Minsk under the pretense of a bomb threat, which turned out to be fabricated by Belarusian authorities. Moreover, the Belarusian military scrambled an armed MiG-29 fighter jet to intercept the flight. Once the passenger plane landed in Minsk, Belarusian police arrested the political activist Raman Pratasevich and his girlfriend Sofia Sapega.
Pratasevich is one of the founders of two popular opposition channels on Telegram used to report on the mass anti-government protests in Belarus in 2020-2021. The Nexta channel in particular played an important role in providing information in an otherwise unfree media landscape. As a longtime opponent to Lukashenko’s authoritarian regime, Pratasevich faced pressure from the authorities and fled Belarus in 2019, first settling in Poland and then in Lithuania, where he continued his activism in exile.
The EU condemned the Belarusian action against the civil plane and the detention of Pratasevich. In a declaration on behalf of the EU on 23 May 2021, the High Representative called for Mr. Pratasevich's immediate release. This was followed by a European Council statement, in which EU leaders called for targeted individual and economic sanctions as well as to ban overflight of EU airspace by Belarusian airlines and prevent access to EU airports of flights operated by these.
Additionally, the US, UK and numerous international civil aviation authorities and private actors have denounced the actions of Belarus as being in breach of international law, describing them as piracy, hijacking and/or terrorism conducted by a state.
As documented in our database, Belarusian authorities and pro-Kremlin media have continually proliferated far-fetched, self-contradicting disinformation narratives and conspiracy theories about the forced landing of the passenger flight. These narratives range from insisting that the pilot himself made the decision to divert the plane, to claiming that Western countries or Ukraine somehow staged the forced landing in order to vilify Belarus. Other narratives admit that the plane was forcibly landed, but claim that Belarus acted in strict accordance with international law or that there was an international warrant for the arrest of Pratasevich. The aim behind the disinformation campaign is to obfuscate the issue, confuse the wider public and divert blame away from Belarus.