Alexander Lukashenko is convinced that the detained journalist Roman Protasevich planned to organize a massacre in Belarus and asked the “numerous Western defenders” of the dissident to clarify for which special services the two detainees worked last Sunday. “Here, in Belarus, he and his accomplices were planning to stage a bloody massacre and rebellion,” Lukashenko was quoted as saying by the 'Sb.by' newspaper..
The Belarusian president believes that the country's enemies have moved from staging riots to “a stage of strangulation”. In his first reaction to Western reprisals for Sunday's incident with the Irish Ryanair plane making an emergency landing in Minsk due to a bomb alert, Lukashenko told parliament that he “acted legally” and “protecting people, according to all international rules”.
As he explained, the bomb warning that led to the landing of the plane, which was flying between Athens and Vilnius, came from Switzerland. The plane was escorted by a Belarusian MiG-29 fighter and made an emergency landing due to a bomb threat that turned out to be false.. On board was the co-founder of Nexta, a Belarusian opposition Telegram channel, who was arrested after landing along with his companion..
Lukashenko assured that Belarus is a testing ground for a future attack on Russia. Outside forces were waging a “hybrid war” against Belarus, the Belta news agency reported.
On May 24, the director of the aviation department of the Belarusian Ministry of Transport said that the bomb threat came from Hamas.. Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum on Monday denied the group's involvement in the incident.
The case of the Ryanair flight has provoked a wave of criticism from European leaders, who accused the Belarusian authorities of interfering in the civil aviation of the European Union.
“Enemies have crossed red lines”
“They have changed their methods of attacking us,” Lukashenko said of the country's 'enemies': “They have crossed many red lines and crossed the limits of common sense and human morality.”. He also added that the plane incident showed that Europe was interacting with the internal enemies of the Belarusian government to destabilize the country.
Lukashenko explained that the defense systems of the Belarusian nuclear power plant were placed on military alert during the plane incident.. The president reported that European countries refused to investigate the circumstances of the emergency landing of the Ryanair flight and equated Western pressures against his country as a policy of “terror at different levels.”
Meanwhile, the Belarusian opposition is preparing to organize a new phase of protests against the government, advanced the leader of the dissidence in exile, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya. “There is nothing to wait for, we have to stop this terror once and for all,” Tikhanovskaya said in a statement on social networks. For his part Lukashenko announced that street protests are no longer possible in Belarus.
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