On May 23, a Ryanair flight passing through Belarusian airspace from Athens to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was forced down in Minsk by a fraudulent bomb threat—backed up by a MiG-29 fighter jet escort. The falsified bomb threat was concocted by the Belarusian government for the purpose of apprehending exiled Belarusian opposition journalist Roman Protasevich. He had taken a flight that intersected Belarusian airspace on his return to Lithuania.
