ISRAEL SHAMIR—The United States insists on its right to land any civilian vessel. In 2004, the United States forcibly landed a private plane in which a member of the Russian parliament’s upper chamber and a former deputy minister, Andrei Vavilov, was flying. He was taken for interrogation directly from the airport.
The most famous case was in 2013. The plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales took off from Moscow. US intelligence agencies suspected Snowden was on board. The president’s plane was forced to land in Vienna, where the plane was searched. Snowden was not found, so the plane was released. Afterwards, the United States publicly and officially declared its holy right to detain and search all the world’s civilian ships.
The United States was not alone in landing planes. In 2012, Turkey forced a Moscow-Damascus plane to land. But it was a Russian plane, so nobody cared.
Whom did the Belarusians detain? A Belarusian citizen named Roman Protasevich, the founder and head of the NEXTA telegram channel, who organized the riots in Minsk in 2020.