Lukashenko’s Air Piracy Has No Western Precedent

The double standards defense is the Kremlin’s go-to device whenever it’s accused of wrongdoing: “You Westerners have no moral right to point fingers because you do it too.” It’s telling that Russia has unfolded the double standards umbrella over Belarussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who on May 23 scrambled a fighter jet to land a Ryanair Holdings Plc plane in Minsk so he could get his hands on one of the passengers, opposition activist Raman Pratasevich. The list of “precedents” Russia is helpfully citing is an indication that flying over Russian airspace, too, can be extremely risky for opponents of President Vladimir Putin, even if the “precedents” themselves don’t hold water.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova named four incidents that, in her view, and thus in official Moscow’s, justify Lukashenko’s action. The first one of these involved the diversion to Vienna of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane in July 2013. Returning home from a conference in Moscow, Morales was suspected by U.S. authorities of bringing with him Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of highly classified intelligence information; several European countries abruptly refused Morales’s aircraft overflight clearance, in effect forcing it to land in Austria before it ran out of fuel. Snowden, of course, wasn’t on the plane, which may or may not have been searched in Vienna to compound the Bolivian leader’s humiliation.