Lukashenko’s air piracy has no Western pattern

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 US 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.
The parallel appears to make sense to some high-profile commentators — for example, to journalist Glenn Greenwald or to Gregor Gysi, the foreign policy speaker of Germany’s far-left Die Linke party. “Then, too, international law was turned into a travesty,” Gysi tweeted. “So there is no moral authority anymore that can effectively defend international law.” Neither Greenwald nor Gysi is defending Lukashenko’s right to grab Pratasevich, but both are using the occasion to point out that because of the Morales incident, no Western leader can protest it without being a hypocrite.
That’s a shaky argument, and not merely on the basis of aviation rules (to wit, a diplomatic plane like Morales’s must apply for overflight clearance before every flight, unlike a commercial carrier like Ryanair that gets such permissions wholesale). There’s a world of difference between a dissident such as Pratasevich, who has opposed the Lukashenko regime since high school and whose “crime” was to help run an anti-Lukashenko Telegram channel, and a fugitive intelligence service employee with government secrets such as Snowden.
It’s true that Snowden’s revelations shed light on highly questionable US practices and there’s no proof that he’s given anything of value directly to Russia aside from a propaganda bonus. But leakers of highly classified information, not to mention those seeking asylum in another country, will almost always be chased by their government, whatever country it runs, a democracy, a tyranny or something in between. That’s just the way the game is played.

—Bloomberg