For journalists like Protasevich, free speech is a matter of life and death

Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of Alexander Lukashenko’s book and campaign for re-election on a vodka-and-sauna approach to managing the pandemic. Belarus was one of a handful of European countries not to impose a lockdown last year, with the President urging his citizens to have plenty of vodka and lots of saunas to avoid infection.

To the consternation of other European leaders, Lukashenko’s laissez-faire approach hasn’t proved a disaster — Belarus’s death toll from the virus currently stands at 2,780, although some people don’t believe the official figures — and I thought it was funny that a politician described as ‘Europe’s last dictator’ and who looks like a Ruritanian despot has turned out to be better at navigating the Covid crisis than many of his more sophisticated peers.

Belarus’s treatment of Roman Protasevich puts western cancel culture in perspective

But I now feel slightly ashamed about making light of this 66-year-old tyrant. On Sunday, a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius was rerouted to Minsk, after what appears to be a fake bomb scare, so that an opposition journalist, Roman Protasevich, could be arrested by the Belarusian police. As the plane was being escorted through Belarus’s airspace by a MiG-29 fighter, supposedly on the orders of Lukashenko, Roman told another passenger: ‘The death penalty awaits me here.’ That isn’t an exaggeration. The blogger was charged with inciting public disorder and social hatred after his coverage of the 2020 presidential election. The operation, which has been called a ‘state-sponsored hijacking’, was overseen by the Belarusian security service, ominously known as the KGB.

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Predictably, Ryanair didn’t cover itself in glory. No one condemns the pilots for landing in Minsk, but the airline issued a statement afterwards that apologised to the passengers for the ‘regrettable delay’ but made no mention of the dissident’s arrest or that of his 23-year-old girlfriend.