West weighs action against Belarus over forced landing of Ryanair flight

Western politicians accused Belarus on Monday of state piracy amounting to a “warlike act”, searching for a way to retaliate that would match the gravity of the offence after Minsk forced an airliner down and arrested a dissident journalist.

Sunday’s action, in which a Belarusian warplane intercepted a Ryanair flight between European Union members Greece and Lithuania and forced it to land in Minsk, has few precedents, and denunciations were worded in the strongest terms.

Belarus authorities arrested a passenger, 26-year-old Roman Protasevich, whose social media feed from exile has been one of the last remaining independent outlets for news about the country since a mass crackdown on dissent last year.