On Sunday, a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was forced out of the sky as it traversed Belarusian airspace. The government of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has clung to power despite widespread protests following a rigged election last August, ordered the plane to make an emergency landing in Minsk under the pretext of a faked bomb threat, carried out by Belarusian security operatives. In an audacious move that sparked a European security crisis, Belarus authorities scrambled a fully armed MiG-29 fighter jet to intercept the civilian flight.
