“Roman Protasevich and Sofia Sapega, who were arrested on Sunday after the passenger flight they were on was diverted and forced to land in Belarus, must be released immediately. The same applies to more than 400 other political dissidents who are imprisoned in Belarus,” Minister of Foreign Affairs Ine Eriksen Søreide said on Wednesday.
“It is shocking and totally unacceptable for the Belarusian regime to forcefully divert a passenger plane in order to arrest an opponent of the regime.
“Norway condemns this act and the Belarusian authorities’ use of force against the Belarusian people. This act is also a violation of international norms and a threat to European security,” she noted.
“Norway is ready to align itself with the additional EU restrictive measures when these are finalized, just as we have aligned ourselves with other EU sanctions against Belarusian officials. The international community must take a firm stance in its reaction towards the Belarusian regime,” Eriksen Søreide said.
“Norway will use every opportunity to draw attention to the unacceptable actions of the Belarusian authorities and will work together with the rest of the international community to continue to put pressure on President Lukashenko and his regime.
“Genuine political dialogue with the opposition is the only solution to the problems in Belarus. We urge the regime to reverse its dangerous course and come to the negotiation table, with the aim of preparing the ground for new, free and fair elections,” Eriksen Søreide concluded.
Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs / #Norway Today / #NorwayTodayNews
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Ukraine did the same thing to Armen Matirosyan, an anti-Maidan revolution – coup – blogger … forcing his airliner to land … but they let soon let him go.
We’ve done the same thing … seizing people off airliners … and grounded socialist Bolivian President Morales’ plane, thinking Snowden was on it.
But Ine is basically right that this kind of air piracy is dangerously shocking and totally unacceptable. On the other hand, so was our 2014 Kiev coup which has the Russians mortally threatened with the possibility of an “interventionist” NATO all the way up to Shostka and Kharkov at their throats … and counter-attacking us every way short of open all-out war.
There must have been some understanding for the Russians to have pulled back half their troops – they had even brought over their Siberian Reserve – from the Ukraine border, so … after Joe( Biden)’s “soulless” gaffe … we seem to have pulled back from the brink.
This guy Lukashenko had seized was in Ukraine’s notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, but apparently only as a propagandist but then indeed involved in our regime-change agitation against Belarus … ergo Russia, Belarus being a crucial buffer state. But it appears he is being beaten/tortured and that certainly is unacceptable after the way he was seized.
Lukashenko may have lost his self-control and judgment. (Before our regime-change/coup attempt, he had tried to walk the fence with Russia and the West, but of course that wasn’t good enough for us.) We’re just lucky Putin hasn’t similarly flipped out … and started pushing buttons.
Regime-change agitation – like Steele’s/MI6’s “dodgy dossier” to try to bring down Trump after his election – the English don’t seem to have learned from the Battle of New Orleans 1815 – is a “totally unacceptable” policy/practice which *we* should stop, or it will inevitably culminate in World War 3 … which Western neocons/militarists think they can fight just up here in Scandinavia … so Central and Western Europe and England and the U.S. don’t become the radioactive wasteland … we do. (There is still contamination from Chernobyl 1986 up in the Dovrefjell.)
Ine might work on stopping that too.