The EU began to prepare the air isolation of Belarus

How Europe is responding to the Ryanair incident

On Monday, May 24, a two-day EU summit begins, one of the main topics of which will be sanctions against Belarus due to the forced landing of an Irish airline Ryanair aircraft in Minsk.

On May 23, a Ryanair airliner flying on the Athens-Vilnius route made an emergency landing in Minsk due to a bomb report on board. The Belarusian authorities said that the pilots themselves decided to land in the Belarusian capital. The airline claims that the crew received instructions to land in Minsk, as well as a message about the mining of the liner, from Belarusian dispatchers. The airliner was escorted to the Minsk airport by a MiG-29 fighter jet raised by the Belarusian Air Force. The former editor-in-chief of the Nexta TELEGRAM channel Roman Protasevich, who was detained by Belarusian law enforcement agencies at the airport on charges of organizing mass riots, was on the Irish plane.

European countries are considering the possibility of stopping flights of their airlines to Belarus and ground transportation between it and the EU, BLOOMBERG reported in the morning. Also, according to him, it is possible to ban the aircraft of the national air carrier Belavia.land at airports in EU countries. REUTERS also reported the same with reference to the office of French President Emmanuel Macron. According to the agency, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has received a request from France to suspend flights over Belarus. Official confirmation of this information from the ICAO has not yet been, however, it is known that the HEAD of the council of the organization convened an urgent meeting on May 27 regarding the incident. Reuters also reported, citing its sources, that the EU summit participants will call on all European airlines to stop flying over Belarus.