‘Our ill-wishers have changed their methods of attacking the state’, blasts critics

Minsk: A defiant President Alexander Lukashenko on Wednesday defended Belarus’s diversion of a European flight and arrest of a dissident on board, lashing out at critics at home and abroad.

In his first public statement since the Ryanair flight was diverted and opposition journalist Roman Protasevich arrested on Sunday, Lukashenko dismissed the international outcry the incident provoked.

"I acted lawfully to protect our people," Lukashenko said in an address to parliament, the Belta state-run news agency reported. The criticism was nothing more than another attempt by his opponents to undermine his rule, he said, accusing them of waging a "modern, hybrid-war" against Belarus.

"Our ill-wishers at home and abroad have changed their methods of attacking the state," Lukashenko said, accusing them of crossing "red lines" and "boundaries of common sense and human morality". "They have moved from organising riots to strangulation."

Lukashenko -- often dubbed "Europe’s last dictator" -- is facing some of the strongest international pressure of his nearly 27-year rule of ex-Soviet Belarus. The strongman and his allies are already under a series of Western sanctions over a brutal crackdown on mass protests that followed his disputed re-election to a sixth term last August. European leaders are now accusing authorities in Minsk of essentially hijacking the passenger flight, and they agreed this week to cut air links with Belarus and told airliners to avoid the country’s airspace.

The Belarusian opposition has called for further and stronger measures, and the UN Security Council was set to meet behind closed doors later on Wednesday. The Athens-to-Vilnius flight was diverted over a supposed bomb scare, with Lukashenko scrambling a MiG-29 fighter jet to accompany the aircraft.

Belarus has released a transcript of communications between Minsk air traffic control and the Ryanair flight, in which the crew was told "you have a bomb on board" and urged to land in Minsk. Lukashenko on Wednesday denied that the fighter jet had forced the airliner to land, calling such claims an "absolute lie".

He claimed that Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania had denied the Ryanair flight permission to land and that the commercial flight’s only option had been to turn to Minsk. Protasevich -- the 26-year-old co-founder of opposition Telegram channel Nexta -- and his Russian girlfriend Sofia Sapega were arrested after the plane landed.

Protasevich, who had been living between Poland and Lithuania, appeared in a video on Monday in which he confessed to helping to organise mass unrest, a charge that could land him in jail for 15 years. Sapega, a 23-year-old law student at the European Humanities University (EHU) in Lithuania, appeared in another video on Tuesday, saying she worked for a Telegram channel that disclosed information about Belarusian police.

Her lawyer said she had been remanded in pre-trial detention for two months and Russia confirmed she was being detained as a criminal suspect. Belarus’s opposition says such videos are routinely recorded by security forces, with participants forced to make statements under duress. Protasevich’s mother told AFP in Poland that she had not slept since he was arrested. "I’m asking, I’m begging, I’m calling on the whole international community to save him," Natalia Protasevich said, weeping. "They’re going to kill him in there."

On Wednesday, dozens of people marched through the streets of Beryozovka east of Minsk for the funeral of Vitold Ashurok, 50, a well-known opposition activist who died Sunday from cardiac arrest in a penal colony in eastern Belarus.

Meanwhile, Belarus on Wednesday accused French authorities of committing an act of "air piracy" after a Belarusian passenger plane flying from Minsk to Barcelona was turned back. "Honestly, this is essentially air piracy," foreign ministry spokesman Anatoly Glaz said in a statement, adding that France’s aviation authorities did not allow the Belarusian plane to pass through French airspace.