As Roman Protasevich’s Ryanair flight began descending towards Minsk, the 26-year-old Belarusian opposition blogger grew frantic, giving his phone and laptop to his girlfriend and pleading with a flight attendant to stop the plane from landing.
“Don’t do this, they will kill me, I am a refugee,” a fellow passenger described him as saying. “We must, we have no choice,” the attendant reportedly replied.
Soon, a visibly trembling Protasevich, who had spent much of last summer managing Telegram channels broadcasting mass protests against the Belarus leader, Alexander Lukashenko, was led away as the plane stood on the tarmac. “I’m facing the death penalty here,” he said. His girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, was also detained.
Before boarding the flight from Greece to Lithuania, where the blogger lives in exile, Protasevich had told friends he was being shadowed at Athens airport by a bald man with a leather suitcase speaking Russian.
“Lol, it seems that the [security services] were following me at the airport,” he texted one friend in Russian. “And even tried to photograph my documents. It’s not certain. But in any case that’s some suspicious shit.”
At that stage there was little suggestion of the extraordinary and historic events that were about to take place. In behaviour that bore the hallmarks of a pariah state, Belarusian authorities forced Protasevich’s plane to divert by calling in a bomb threat then scrambled a MiG-29 to escort it down to Minsk airport.
Four more people deplaned in the Belarusian capital, suggesting Protasevich’s hunch that he was being tailed by the local KGB was correct. “[Lukashenko] carried it off beautifully,” wrote Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Russian state-financed RT.
Often referred to as Europe’s last dictator, Lukashenko brutally suppressed last year’s protests, prompting sanctions against his regime. Now, as Europe’s leaders meet to discuss their response to what the Ryanair CEO, Michael O’Leary, called a “state-sponsored hijacking”, he faces the prospect of having air links to his country suspended altogether.
Protasevich had been in Greece to cover a speech at the Delphi Economic Forum by Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader in exile, and then spent time a few days on holiday before boarding his flight back to Vilnius, where he lives. Tikhanovskaya and an aide, Franak Viačorka, had taken the same flight over Belarus a week earlier without incident.
Passengers onboard the flight on Sunday described a slow descent into horror as Protasevich, who fled Belarus fearing for his life in 2019, realised he would be landing in a country that has charged him with terrorism and inciting mass riots.
The plane was closer to Vilnius than Minsk when, at about 12.50pm local time, an emergency signal was activated. Belarus claims the pilot chose to land in Minsk, but Ryanair said the decision came from Belarusian air traffic controllers.
“When it was announced that the plane was returning to Belarus, I saw his reaction,” Nikos Petalis, a Greek passenger who runs a fast food business in Lithuania, told Mega TV on Monday. “He started grabbing his head as if something bad was going to happen. He seemed scared … You looked at him and thought: ‘Something is going on with him.’”
“It looked like if the window had been open, he would have jumped out of it,” another passenger, Edvinas Dimsa, told Agence France-Presse.
During the descent, Protasevich, dressed in a hoodie, black cap and face mask, began preparing for his arrest. “He got up and grabbed his bag and started passing his computer and telephone and some things to his girlfriend and hide some information,” said a passenger seated several seats behind Protasevich.
Passengers were kept in the dark while Belarusian fighter jets flanked the plane on its approach to an emergency landing in Minsk. “The company kept sending us text messages but no explanation was ever made by the pilot as to why the plane made the emergency landing,” said Petalis.
Once the Boeing 737-800 landed in Minsk, passengers were kept onboard for an hour while patrol guards with dogs assembled outside. Guard dogs were brought onboard for a security check and then the passengers were escorted to a waiting room where they were “weren’t allowed to move, even go to the loo”, Petalis said.
Another passenger said they were stripped down and forced to undergo body searches. “It was the old tradition of the Russian, Soviet services,” he said, describing being stripped of his boots and searched “all over” by hand. “It was very unpleasant.”
Before that, security officials approached Protasevich and searched him separately as his fellow passengers watched. Then, with little explanation, he was led away.
“It was straight out of a film, a horror film,” said Petalis.
The whereabouts of Protasevich and Sapega are still unknown.