This has also been set in motion: https://i.redd.it/elts5rgbg0171.jpg

Worth noting that the EU has banned entire nations (such as Kazakhstan and others) from flying in EU airspace before for not meeting safety expectations. It is absolutely within possibility to ban Belarus for an overt Chicago convention violation.

>It is absolutely within possibility to ban Belarus for an overt Chicago convention violation.

EU did the same thing in 2013 by forcing the Bolivian president's plane to land in an effort to catch Snowden. They have no moral or legal standing here whatsoever.

https://euobserver.com/justice/120734

Maybe no moral standing, but they still have legal standing.

This wasn’t even remotely similar.

Those EU countries didn’t allow the plane into their airspace, encouraging it to land in a third country to refuel.

Belarus called in a fake bomb threat and used their fighter jets to force a passenger flight to land in their territory, not to mention the KGB officers on board making a scene.

Outcome might be similar, but it’s specifically the tactics used which make this unacceptable.

>Those EU countries didn’t allow the plane into their airspace, encouraging it to land in a third country to refuel.

Seems like a trivial difference. Denying access to your airspace comes with the implicit threat of fighter interception.

In the event that you are not a Russian troll, let me explain two key differences:

The Morales jet was warned ahead of time in a legal way, not intercepted and forced to land in an unintended destination.

No persons from the Morales jet were detained.

One is an lawful act (perhaps imoral in some way) , and one is an arbitrary act outside of any lawful framework . I hope this clears the confusion.

Morales plane was searched. If Snowden was on it, he would have been detained.

It's not that Belarus' actions are admissable. It's that the West is acting in a hypocritical way.

If Belarus had as much power as the US, they surely would have followed the same route and forced all the surrounding nations to close their airspace. The end result would be the same.

It was searched according to the local law where it landed. Nobody forced them to land in Austria - could have just as easily returned to Moscow.

The stark difference between the way the West does it is that you have a choice whenever to comply or pick an alternative, whereas Belarus left no choice.

EU, as a matter of routine, forbids certain persons from entering their airspace, has refused entry countless times to planes (some of them airborne) based on passenger manifests. Nobody would have batted an eye if Belarus would have done the same.

Pointing a gun (armed MiG fighter) at a civilian airplane based on who is a passenger using a deceptive pretext, outside laws and regulations, is several orders of magnitudes worse than lawful application of rules. If you fail to see why, read about habeas corpus.

The same end result achieved by legal or illegal means is more than enough difference. One is performed by the consent of many, the other by thuggery of few.

It a huge difference... You're suggesting there is a conspiracy a foot. When in practice it's quite likely France, Spain, etc. just denied access because then the diplomatic hot potato wouldn't be theirs :)

And I'm hindsight Austria probably regrets they didn't deny access too, because then the potato wouldn't have landed on their soil.

It's not very bold to say: "pass don't involve me", but it's not necessarily a conspiracy to intercept a plane. That would have to involve a lot of people, and would probably leak..

They had a bunch of plain clothes operatives follow a guy onto a public flight, fake a bomb threat and scramble jets to get the plane to land?

All this whataboutism isn't really bringing much to the discussion here...

What next, the West can't complain about human rights violations in HK or Mongolia just because US police shot some dude (again)?

“whataboutism” is a thought-terminating cliche — it’s a directly analogous situation that shows that there are no principles or rule-based order, only power. you have the power to get away with doing this, or you don’t; lofty rhetoric is a propaganda measure

“Whataboutism” gets my goat because:

* It generally has no context. Yes, the West did something similar. It does not follow that the West will engage in the same type of systemic evil, that argument must be made on its own.

* Whataboutism often implies that naughty behavior is ok; that the hypocrisy of the West is justification for some further evil. One is at best making the argument that everyone is evil so just do it

* It consistently assumes the ignorance of particularly Americans - that if you just tell the dumb American that his government did something bad too, the scales will fall from their eyes, they will accept everything is evil and meaningless, and they will stop criticizing you

* the West is just plain better, on the historical record, at admitting and correcting hypocrisy. It’s a kind of meta-hypocrisy for these countries that never actually implement a liberal system to do such a great job of helping us improve ours, by pointing out flaws we’re secure enough to fix and they’re not.

Moreover, whataboutism does not prove that only power exists. Much the opposite: it proves that, at least in the West, moral norms can have force. Else why would Easterners bother with it?

No, it was not the same thing. That plane had all means to travel in another direction, including return to departure point (it had more than enough fuel for it). Also, whataboutism.

No. You don't underestand. Snowden = american criminal. America = our friend. This guy = belorussian criminal. Lukashenkon - until some months ago our friend, now - our enemy.

Only the airlines, not the nation.

You can fly from Kazakhstan on an European carrier to Europe. Europe previously have also banned shoddy Soviet era airliners that are both incredibly loud, toxic and quite unsafe, which is the right thing to do.

I feel this is a fairly pedantic correction, though of course you're very correct nonetheless. My opinion is that banning all of a nations major airlines from operating in your airspace is functionally equivalent to banning that nation. Belarus is much like Kazakhstan in that the vast majority of routes from its airports are by its national airlines. Most of the routes to the EU are flown by Belavia (Belarus' national airline) https://www.flightconnections.com/flights-from-minsk-msq.

Well, I feel like it's important to point out that people can still fly direct from $nation to Europe despite the ban.

Most of flights to Europe are codeshares with Belavia, so not really.

European diplomats being "strongly concerned" have long become a running joke here in Russia: https://twitter.com/ISEUConcerned

I sincerely hope that this statement finally gets backed up by some decisive action that can put real pressure on these dictators, but I don't get my hopes up.

I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

Is it like China yet? I'm guessing not as there's no visible list of banned words and phrases, but we don't see (in HN) much criticism of Russia, Belarus from there, just attacks on the hypocrisy of the West.

Do you see it headed towards China, where no internal criticism is allowed?

Criticism is allowed unless you have ambitions to work in government. Critique of the government has become actually quite common in the Russian stand up comedy scene. There are some exceptions, like you cannot show any public disrespect to the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov (you can google how people apologise to him).

Edit (forgot to mention): also, participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities

Edit 2: also, there is an ongoing crisis with the independent media: the Russian government is trying to suffocate the independent news outlets by classifying them as foreign agents (which has pretty bad practical outcomes for the news outlet)

The question was if people (I assumed a regular folk, not journalists and opposition) are allowed to make jokes about the government, and I answered to that. Of course I know that Russia has no traces of democracy left and I am aware how Russia targets high-profile people, including journalists. You should be more reserved before telling people they don't know anything.

Allowed? People would do it anyway. Most Eastern European communist era jokes involved the beloved leader. Russian jokes about politicians and policies are even better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_political_jokes

No, the question was:

> Do you see it headed towards China, where no internal criticism is allowed?

But if you’re a russian opposed to Putin you cant’t really answer that on a western-run online platform.. (unless you’re considered insignificant enough by the Russian government, so you can safely be ignored of course)

I answered to this question:

> are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia?

> participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities

This is quickly becoming the situation in the US if you criticize popular political movements.

Not exactly... In the US, organizations use this form of self-censorship to prevent a potential backlash from the public, whereas in Russia, the bans are direct orders from the government and the employers simply don't have any choice.

Often, there is less practical difference than I’d hope for. Look at the credit card networks’ sanctions of things like allofmp3.com, for example.

If you enjoy audio fiction, or short stories you might enjoy “The Revolution, brought to you by Nike”. It was written by an ad industry insider, and touches on a lot of issues regarding corporate self-censorship. (It’s a few years old, and predates Nike’s recent political activism):

https://escapepod.org/2018/09/06/escape-pod-644-the-revoluti...

For example, there have been many documented cases in the past few years of people getting fired over supporting the BDS movement - or in a few cases, not actively supporting anti-BDS movements.

... oh, that's not what you meant?

How will you know if the answer to this is honest or censored, though?

For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"

For China and Russia, etc, it feels as if by mocking the hypocrisy of the West they are naively assuming that there's no such criticism from within the West.

I think this is revealing but I might be wrong.

> For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"

It is exactly the same in Russia, you may not mention certain historical facts at all, e.g. Germany-USSR cooperation during 1939-1941

As a native Russian I do remember learning about the said cooperation in school in the 2000s

That's why there is a Russian language Wikipedia article about said cooperation: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Договор_о_ненападении_между_... and that article cites a number of print books.

To be fair, that's likely neither hosted in Russia nor exclusively edited by Russian residents.

The Chinese Wikipedia has an article on the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre, for example. I would assume it's not available in China. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4...

Well, this is fine example of so-called "lie", plain and simple. You may mention it, and often it is being mentioned by all kinds of media. Things that really are frowned upon are highly controversial topics like alleged mass raping by the Red Army in Germany during WW2 . Other than that, no holds are barred, and things are discussed freely; I'd say hot topics are more frequent in Russian media than in the US one ; but clearly hotness and level of controversy is different in two blocs

It seems you're quibbling on which topics can't be talked about, not that there are some.

Many countries have forbidden topics. Try to question whether holocaust was real in EU.

if you're still in Russia, try posting some photos of 1939 Brest-Litovsk parade on your VK page, we'll watch from afar how it goes for you

Like this? https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Парад_вермахта_перед_частями_Р...

no, like post it to your VK and write "USSR cooperated with Nazis to divide and occupy Poland"

Alleged?

You can google my username, and get my social network accounts for the last 20 years, and a lot of details me and even my family, wikipedia article about my grandfather and his history in USSR, and so on. And then ask yourself if state propaganda would go to such trouble for a couple of comments. It's not doxing, I wouldn't use it if I wasn't completely okay with that.

It is a crime to make caricatures of Vladimir Putin.

Someone is downvoting this comment to death, so I'm sharing the story for the brave and curious.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/05...

It's also apparently not advisable to beat him in ice hockey.

https://deadspin.com/vladimir-putin-scores-eight-goals-in-ru...

Pikabu is one of the most popular Russian websites (something like Reddit). Here's search results of Putin caricatures: https://pikabu.ru/tag/%D0%92%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D...

It might be a crime, but it's not enforced enough, obviously.

The real reason for that law is probably to use it as a tool against dissidents.

I am very worried that the situation is headed towards China, or much worse.

And the main reason I am worried is that I can see no path towards a peaceful de-escalation. It is a foregone conclusion in the West that "Russia = bad" and any attempt to say anything counter to that narrative gets you labeled a pro-Kremlin troll. Let's see how deep in the grey this comments ends up for example.

Think Germany after WW1. Humiliated, defeated country. The people of such countries tend to follow leaders who promise to make them great again. When they do, they get further mockery and isolation. And I think it's been conclusively proven that this only breeds more radicalism.

But most will read this as "if you are not with us then you are against us" and turn up the intensity.

While criticism is legal, it does significantly increase your chances of falling out a window, if you're in a prominent position. Very careless, these Kremlin critics.

Interestingly, critics of repressive regimes exhibit _themed_ carelessness; those who were a bit too open in Apartheid South Africa fell down _stairs_, instead.

> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

That's a tough question. For example, when I was active in TikTok (I grew tired of it pretty fast), I've made a lot of very critical videos that had a lot of views. In one of them, that got almost 100k views, I explicitly said that Putin and his gang are usurping power, and while the current Russian laws say that it's punishable up to 20 years in prison, I think that they deserve the death penalty. I did not get in any trouble for that. But many others from Russian Libertarian Party (which I'm a member of) have, even though they've said much less. May be they had a wider reach, or may be it's just random, I don't know. And I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of years later I'll get 5 years of prison for these TikToks.

thanks for your perspective! Is the chilling factor an issue there yet? It feels from your comments that it's not, that its a bit too random yet, or a bit too early?

> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states? Is it like China yet?

Yes, plenty of people inside those countries do not like regime and openly discuss it on public internet websites. I don't know about China situation so I can't make a direct comparison. If you're very popular blogger and you'll make direct insults to Putin (or any other person with high position), you might be fined or even jailed, there are laws prohibiting insults against people, but those cases are very rare. And nobody hunts ordinary people.

> I'm guessing not as there's no visible list of banned words and phrases, but we don't see (in HN) much criticism of Russia, Belarus from there, just attacks on the hypocrisy of the West.

Huh? HN is pretty much against Russia, Belarus, etc. Those who try to defend usually are heavily downvoted and labeled as kremlin bots.

Anyway people usually are gathered with similar viewpoints. Any outsiders are expelled quickly. I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-Russian viewpoint and I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-West viewpoint. But I know no webforum with balanced opinion. I think that for US people Republicans vs Democrats might be a close analogy.

> If you're very popular blogger and you'll make direct insults to Putin (or any other person with high position), you might be fined or even jailed

> nobody hunts ordinary people

Unless they have something bad to say about the regime. These don’t add up, are bloggers not ordinary people? How can you be ok with this?

> Unless they have something bad to say about the regime.

That's not true.

> are bloggers not ordinary people?

No, they're influencers.

> How can you be ok with this?

Why wouldn't I be ok with this? Nobody should be allowed to insult anyone.

> are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

What "associated astern european states" do you mean?

Belarus probably serves as a decent example.

Belarus aside, which ones? Because I can't think of any.

Seriously, it's been over thirty years since the end of Cold War and people still think there are some eastern European states associated with Russia... Almost all of them are in the EU now with the notable exception of Ukraine which is in a state of de facto war with Russia. Even Lukashenko has a bitter-sweet relationship with Putin.

There's still Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidjan. Technically, the Caucasus region is still in Europe.

Of these, Georgians are as anti-Kremlin as one could be, they were at open war against Russia in 2008. Armenia is a pro-European democracy. Azerbaijan, probably the least democratic of these, doesn't long for Kremlin either. In general, all eastern-European countries were happy to become independent from Russia and there is no reason for them to choose Russia over the EU.

So one would never refer to them as "Russia and associated eastern european states" because, frankly speaking, Kremlin has no friends in Eastern Europe. (I specifically differentiate between Kremlin with its cold-blooded war crimes, and Russian people, who are normal nice folks and are a significant part of the total population of Eastern Europe.)

I've seen some consider Kazakhstan to be a part of Europe. I suspect the region stretches, depending on the speaker, far enough east to encompass the speaker's country, regardless of its location (but no further).

Kazahstan is in Central Asia probably because it's so big. Even their timezones are prefixed with Asia. The Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains are the eastern limits of Europe, so everything on the Caspian's west bank is in Europe. Astrakhan is in Europe for instance.

There is this reaction in internet communities to demand a kind of reaction from a democratic organisation that would only be possible in an autocracy.

As a EU citizen, this is quite hilarious. The EU is so toothless it hurts.

Couldn't agree more. The pattern is basically:

1. High-ranking official says they're "gravely/deeply/very concerned" within the first 24-48h.

2. Some EU parliament member mentions the problem within two or three weeks, shaming other members. A clip of this few minutes long speech gets shared all over social media.

3. Absolutely nothing happens until everyone forgets about the issue.

Over and over again, issue after issue, day after day.

Is this better or worse than the US pattern of sanctions and drone strikes?

Would you prefer a strong, centralised EU government with a strong leader (aka dictator)?

Well, I don't.

But this is the only way to take direct action - as the individual members are not of a single mind.

Democracies can be capable of quick direct action too. See U.S. esp. U.S. some 50-70 years back. Democracy is no excuse for being inefficient, if democracies don't find a way to protect their values and interests, they will eventually be replaced by more efficient states

I was just explaining to my children that there was a time when the USA government employed censors (an actual job title) to control television content.

Much that the USA was or did 50-70 years ago was decidedly not democratic and not their proudest moment.

Ah yes, the glory days of "quick direct action" in Vietnam and Cambodia. What fun was had by everyone! What progress was achieved! We should totally long for that.

These are examples of unsuccessful wars, although we don't know how many times the possibility of American intervention prevented USSR from starting theirs. Korean war was partially successful though, the whole Korea could look like North Korea if US didn't intervene

I think the US has demonstrated enough "possibility of intervention" since 1991, wouldn't you agree...? Kuwait is "free" but Iraq is lost to Iran, Afghanistan and Rwanda are still a mess.

Guns don't solve everything.

I would consider intervention in Yugoslavia pretty successful actually, instead of genocidal nationalist dictatorship we have a couple of democracies - not without their problems, but still no comparison to Milosevic regime.

Interventions in Iraq, Lybia and Syria can be seen as failures if we consider the bold goal to bring democracy to the Middle East. But at least these countries don't attack other countries any more - ISIS as evil as it is can't cause as much harm as these could.

In any case I guess with Eastern Europe it's more likely to work like it did in Yugoslavia than in Middle East. Belarus has really strong civil society, all they are missing is really some guns.

Yugoslavia was screwed up in the first place by foreign countries sponsoring separatists in Slovenia and Croatia. When that predictably turned out to be a terrible idea, “we” then decided to solve it with bombs, and while doing it we came pretty close to massive escalation with the Russians. We barely mopped up a mess of “our” own making, and it’s still a mess down South. “Successful” is not a word I would use.

Lybia is more of a mess than under Qaddafi, which means the issues with migration to Europe have worsened and the Lybians themselves are worse than they were. Same for Iraq. I won’t get into Syria since that wasn’t really a straight military intervention.

Yea, what Belarus really needs now is a good civil war, so that Putin can annex more territory on one side and we can create a new border that will be forever disputed. Or, as alternative, we can have them be the casus belli for thermonuclear war between NATO and Russia, that will work great.

Or you know, we can wait. Worst case scenario, Lukashenko sooner or later will die. Best case, enough of his security apparatus will decide he’s not worth propping up anymore. Either way, no guns required.

"centralised EU government with a strong leader (aka dictator)?"

Those are the only two options? Like how you can either have people dying because they cant afford a surgery, or you become EUSSR?

Sometimes it's the slow and steady diplomacy that affects the biggest change over time.

What good is quick action going to do?

It might be better to let this guide trading policies in the future.

for the guy that's being detained (or worse) right now every minute kind of counts

It's cold, but in the long run one person probably doesn't matter that much.

No offense to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but he probably wasn't worth trouble :)

Good, so you're in favour of an EU army? Armed invasion of Bielorussia to kidnap the guy back?

The geopolitical armchair experts complain more about responses than actually giving realistic suggestions to give.

(Sure, we can cut Belarus out, and see thousands of "Russian tourists" go for a holiday there right after - maybe that would be a good response?). And yes, you won't see me defending Borrell.

Friendly note: people from the country of Belarus call themselves "Belarusians" (pronounced like "bela-roo-sians", not like "bela-russians"), and take offence at the term "Bielorussia".

This might be a simple mistranslation; in many Romance languages, Belarus is called 'Bielorussia'.

That's interesting! From my (admittedly very weak) understanding of Cyrillic, I'd expect Беларусь to be pronounced with a "y" sound as part of the "e", similarly to the vowel at the start of Ельцин (Yeltsin).

Presumably that's because of a lack of orthographic knowledge on my part... or is it something more subtle (say, the belorusian language differing from Russian)? I have a vague memory of languages in the former Yugoslavia being either "ekavsky" or "ijekavsky".

Noted and fixed, as the other commenter noted it was the wrong language (and yes the romance languages call it something like Bielorussia, not much that can be done about that, sorry)

I agree. There is a lot of armchair whining here. Are people really in favour of an invasion of Belarus?

Why are you talking like there's no middle between not doing anything and a full on invasion?

From the top of my head:

- Divert EU planes to avoid Belarus.

- Prevent Belarus' aeroplanes from flying over the EU.

- Increase sanctions towards Belarus officials.

etc etc

Yes, and all of them take time to be put into motion. A lot of different parties will have to agree, including immoral profit-driven scum like Ryanair. That's what democracy looks like in practice; it ain't as pretty and orderly as a tyrannical dictatorship, where one guy says something and everyone complies right away.

All of that means it's early to complain about any lack of European reaction. In some areas there has been a strong response already, and it will likely get stronger in the next few weeks.

Yes, but, remember mh-17 - the plane with 200 dutch citizens that russians blasted out of the sky in 2014? I'm sure strong response from the EU is coming in any minute now.

Russia was sanctioned as part of the annexation of Crimea, of which that crime was part.

Well that's a most uncharitable characterisation of Ryanair. They are indeed profit-driven but they are unashamedly upfront and, frankly, honest about this. Their ruthless efficiency enables cheap flights across Europe, which was largely out of reach to previous generations. I'm not sure how they really differ from other successful profit-driven businesses, other than perhaps their marketing approach. You can choose not to fly with them of course, but many do, and wouldn't consider themselves immoral for doing so.

After this very incident, they continued flying over Belarus like nothing had happened. They couldn't sacrifice even a penny of profit, after one of their very own passengers had been kidnapped, to guarantee the safety of their customers. That was scummy, but absolutely in character for a business that doesn't even pretend to care about anything but their money. It took European law to make them provide the bare minimum of human comfort to their passengers.

I often have little alternative but to fly with Ryanair, as the airport in my hometown has been effectively taken over by them during a downturn. I honestly don't even experience much of the "cheapness" - for one reason or another, flying with my kids always ends up costing as much as on a regular airline. They currently owe me 600 quid for a flight I had booked pre-pandemic which obviously got cancelled - and they'd rather sit on a "voucher" for a decade rather than refund me, of course. I'm happy they changed the market a bit, but that was 30 years ago, now they're just a garden variety sociopathic business.

Thanks, yes, these are realistic, and might be in the way of being implemented.

(Also probably will get counted as "toothless". That's kinda of my point)

The difference here is the European politicians will be scared shitless if they fly over a country where they think they might get arrested.

Politicians scare easily and will protect themselves. If journalists can be arrested so can politicians.

That's because EU is too expanded to be able to reach consensus. Individual countries are taking action however

Can individual countries yank airport landing slots? That would get attention.

This is where professional politicians need to learn a lesson from the Great Orange One. If Buttigieg had just answered "No, I don't think our passenger planes are safe over Bellarus anymore, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to protect the safety of US citizens flying in Europe", that would have been fine.

Considering the recent revelations that Russia is literally blowing shit up in NATO countries (Bulgaria, Czechia) and EU and NATO's lack of response, this will most likely not result in any meaningful reaction either.

What is the probability of this account being owned by Russian government?

I would say 99% and you’re just perpetuating the same propaganda.

Golergka has been here longer than you and has a much larger online footprint than you do. The chances of you being a propaganda account are larger than theirs. Besides the obvious rule violation I think you should probably apologize. Flagging this comment.

You can't attack another user like that, and we ban accounts that do. Please read the site guidelines and stick to the rules from now on. Note this one:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've posted endlessly for many years about how the overwhelming majority of such accusations are based on nothing but fantasy—poisonous fantasy, which it is not ok to pollute the threads with, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this please, regardless of political orientation or ideology or nation.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

No, much smaller. I would agree that the EU's foreign policy is a disaster because of traditionally corrupted elites. The fact that the russian elites are even more corrupted is not an excuse.

EU doesn’t have a joint foregin policy. Foregin relations is still an intergovernmental matter.

„The Common Foreign and Security Policy […] deals only with a specific part of the EU's external relations, which domains include mainly Trade and Commercial Policy and other areas such as funding to third countries, etc”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Foreign_and_Security_Po...

This is a random result when you search for Borrell in Moscow. Look for his behavior in Turkey if you want some more examples of how random this guy is while he is considered an EU representative. His position requires for him to coordinate responses of the 27, but he is just wandering around wasting time and resources. As far as the EU is an economic powerhouse, letting dictators do whatever they want while allowed access to the market is making him irrelevant.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/borrell-...

The HR post is a bit of an in-joke in European circles. It's being given to 2nd-rate European politicians who like to travel, and has zero effective power. The hard decisions are all taken among NATO members and are then ratified in the European Council.

Sadly this is one of the current issues of the EU project, nation-states flatly refuse to hand over anything related to defense. It's a great victory for the US.

Some EU member states (Hungary, Poland) are very much against handing over any diplomatic power to the High Representative. Hungarian government is basically acting as a Putin proxy here and Polish ruling party feeds on constant conflict.

I agree. At the same time Borrell has enough independence to make him a distinct face. He decides where he goals, what to say, how to behave when the EU is being mocked. Even if you say that he is just a glorified PR, he is an awful PR.

It looks that I'm picking on him, but he is just a very good example. I can talk a lot about others, but this thread is politicized enough already.

No, they're not a Putin proxy. What they're doing is literally pissing against the wind. A recent example: Hungary has bought vaccines from Russia and China which are not approved by the EMA. Now their recipients are basically not recognised as vaccinated and will face travel issues.

Yeah, the HR role has been systematically sabotaged since its inception, by way of appointing weaker and weaker nominees and starving it of any real power. At the moment it's a glorified PR position, with no decisional power whatsoever. Javier Solana effectively lost the battle for being the EU "foreign minister" and since then it's all been about individual member states.

Chances are this will not change until there is a serious rethinking of the European role in NATO. As long as the big decisions are taken there, there is no real role for an EU "ministry" beyond trade interests.

as it should be, the EU states act collectively at most trough NATO and the current decade EU so focused on being the political voice of its members is something being tacked on against the initial premise by which its members came together; the EU should always had been an economic union first to combat the tremendous advantage of the internal market that both USA and China enjoy and nothing more.

Click on my username and go through my latest comments. If I'm a Russian propaganda troll, I must be a really elaborate one.

Why would a russian troll argue for stronger action agains russian allies?

An excerpt from HN rules:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [email protected] and we'll look at the data.

It has been a joke outside of Russia, also... I share your hope.

Russia and Belarus make money from the planes flying over their airspace. They won't be collecting that money so there is at least one consequence.

Clarification: not just these 2 countries. I wonder if all countries do it.

Most of them do, but most will also waive it for flights originating or departing from said country.

Some countries go above and beyond; Russia typically grants overflight access to one airline per country, so SAS has the ability to fly over Russia while Norwegian Air never has.

Probably correct but not sure Russia’s rule applies here? SAS is Swedish/Danish and Norwegian is, well, Norwegian.

Wikipedia[1] says: Scandinavian Airlines, usually known as SAS, is the flag carrier of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

In any case grandparent poster is probably just repeating info out of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNDYBt9e_U&t=382s

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Airlines

> no consequences

MH17 being shot down meant a huge diversion of flights over a well trafficked route. It's not huge but the overflight fees add up after a while if people avoid crossing your borders, effective ATC in most countries rely on these aeronautical charges coming in every year.

While the effects might not be immediate and a stubborn government can shrug it off, there is certainly long-term consequences if airlines make a decision to declare a country off-limits for routes.

Right now a broad ban on Belavia flights to Europe is a very likely outcome.

The airlines making those decisions have no incentive (or likely desire) to punish Belarus or engage in international politics.

They just don't want their planes diverted by MiGs.

>This will likely have no consequences to the regime in Belarus

That's the problem with sanctions, at some point you run of of things to take away. From then on your target can pretty much do what ever they want, knowing that things can't really get any worse.

Current sanctions on Belarus are somewhere between light and negligible.

There are a lot more things that could be taken away.

Expanding the sanctions to affect the entire country / citizenry has the side-effect of pushing populism there even closer to Russia, materially and emotionally, without having much effect on the actual bad actors beyond what the current sanctions do.

Traditionally a next step would be political, then material, support for an organized internal opposition, but there doesn't seem to be an obvious one in this case.

Economic sanctions can be aimed at Belarusian elites and state enterprises: ban on direct export to Belarus of luxury goods, advanced technology, ban on certain imports etc. At the same time freedom of movement with transit routes via Russia or Ukraine should be encouraged, to support low-volume trade and grey market. The bigger is shadow economy and the less concentrated is private sector, the more difficult is it for the regime to control it. It stimulates low level corruption and reduces loyalty of the law enforcement, increasing the chances of the opposition in the future.

> Economic sanctions can be aimed at Belarusian elites and state enterprises

Yes, this is already happening since last year, and was already scheduled to be expanded for a fourth time in June. I assume this clinches that, and probably more.

But the fact nobody seems to know there's been sanctions since last year suggests my other point - they're woefully ineffective as long as they can get other support.

Sanctions are almost always too weak. Any sanction that the government can withstand is too weak and will have the affect you describe. A strong sanction that says "release the prisoner immediately" will be short and not affect citizens long enough to create such a sentiment.

What kind of sanction do you have in mind?

No use of airspace and no trade with NATO countries until the prisoners are released. It would take a week.

No use of airspace is already being discussed and likely going to happen.

NATO is a military alliance, not a trade union. There's no way for them to organize what you're suggesting.

> It would take a week.

Fidel might like to have a word with you...

NATO members do talk to each other over a lot of different channels. It will take more than a week to organize, but it can be done.

But it will be as e.g. an EU action, not a NATO action. (I have doubts they will get anyone on the west side of the Atlantic to sign on, but I hope I'm wrong.) And the EU has already been acting.

My point is: There's a lot of people in this thread demanding a vague "something" be done, but it's really not clear whether there is "something" between what the EU's plan has already been for months and a hot war, other than some ill-considered immediate panic.

Was Fidel being offered sanctions to end by releasing a specific hostage? Or was he being asked to relinquish power?

Not so. Sanctions can be devastatingly effective applied by a significant majority of the world over a length of time. Sanctions were the instrument that brought an end to the Apartheid regime in South Africa: sanctions, having brought the South African economy to its knees, were a key factor in forcing the ruling regime to the negotiating table.

Yes, in some fairytale world the ruling National Party could have continued "doing whatever they want". Here in reality things would certainly have got worse, and the National Party government could see that the end-game was inescapable. Sanctions worked then, and they'll work again.

I know a little about this; it's pretty controversial, historically, whether Western sanctions, vs. decades of civil war and violent insurrection (often backed by subvert support from the Kremlin with the CIA playing defense) in SA and neighboring states were the catalyst. There are plenty of historians / economists who would argue that sanctions made things worse for the people of South Africa (much the same is said today about sanctions against Iran). In any event, that sanctions where "the" instrument that brought an end to apartheid should not be stated as if it were a universally accepted fact.

Let's ignore how ridiculous it is to give the West the credit for ending apartheid and that the economic growth of South Africa really doesn't back up your claim that sanctions were the key.

Even assuming you're right about the cause, the success story of sanctions would be a South African economy that never recovered leading to the suffering of millions. That's what happens when they "work."

What about Cuba? North Korea? Iran? They’ve been sanctioned for decades with devastating human consequences and little to no sign of those sanctions spurring any meaningful change.

I don't disagree with you but I do wonder whether for sanctions to be successful relies a lot on the way the population is feeling about the regime at the start. If they population decides to dig in, then the sanctions start to have a negative effect (in terms of getting a desired outcome).

If on the other hand the population is already angry at the regime, maybe it has the desired effect.

Idle musing without supporting evidence.

Only the US sanctioned Cuba and while it was pretty harmful, they were still able to trade with most other countries. North Korea has China right next door as a big trade partner, and can trade with many non-US countries as well. As for Iran, from what I can tell UN sanctions really only started to ramp up in the 2010s and those did have an effect in getting Iran to suspend its nuclear program.

Edit: But to be clear, I think the US sanctions on Cuba are gratuitous and cruel. Cuba is not some rogue state and there are many worse dictatorships that aren't sanctioned. However, I think it reinforces the point that "sanctions can be devastatingly effective applied by a significant majority of the world" because in the Cuba case the rest of the world didn't agree.

> Only the US sanctioned Cuba and while it was pretty harmful, they were still able to trade with most other countries.

There were considerable limits (particularly on foreign investment in Cuba) because parts of the US sanctions regime include retaliatory sanctions on entities making use of certain property in Cuba (some of these were suspended for a while, but restored under Trump in 2017.)

The impact of sanctions against apartheid SA get talked about a lot because it's a good example of international cooperation for non-violent activism.

Unfortunately talking only about sanctions ignores that plenty of governments resisted and watered down the sanctions because the apartheid regime's anti-communist ideology.

The negotiations to phase out apartheid for a democracy began mere months after the fall of the Berlin wall. At that point the collapse of the USSR was imminent, and the apartheid regime's utility as an anti-Communist outpost had expired.

>, knowing that things can't really get any worse.

But also knowing that things can get better. The incentive to do the "right" thing doesn't disappear. It only can't be increased further.

What will increase the costs for the regime is putting sanctions on potash sales, which is the primary source of foreign currency there. Of course, Russia would just make up for it, but they had a hand in this as well, so attach a dollar value to this geopolitical hooliganism.

I like that idea, this is the perfect *nonviolent* answer to this.

The EU's response is so important here, they have already proved time and time again they are a dog which is all bark and no bite.

I'm sure China and Turkey are watching eagerly.

It doesn't have to be a military response, but no response or the typical waving the finger in the air, can not be afforded here.

> they have already proved time and time again they are a dog which is all bark and no bite.

People keep saying that as if that was a kind of universally acknowledged wisdom.

Here is a map of the 39 countries targeted by European sanctions (not counting the ones specifically targeting ISIS territories or various regions of Ukraine): https://sanctionsmap.eu/#/main

There has been sanctions against Belarus for a while, suspended when they freed political prisoners, reinstated in light of the recent crackdown on elections. Here is the list of the 88 persons and 7 legal entities under EU sanctions (well technically, Council of Europe): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

Turkey doesn't have to "watch", they also received sanctions after the drilling standoff two years ago.

I'm an EU citizen we obviously have a different viewpoint on this but the link you sent to me shows precisely all bark in my opinion.

Holding off on a few weapons exports here and there is meaningless.

> People keep saying that

If it's the general concensus there may be some reason for that. I'm sure Belarus wouldnt try this with a US plane.

> Turkey doesn't have to "watch", they also received sanctions after the drilling standoff two years ago.

If the reaction to hijacking an EU plane flying from one EU nation to another is indeed just some export/import sanctions, then yes I do think Turkey will find that interesting.

Well, read the link again: the sanctions include a list of names, whose assets are frozen, who can't travel in EU and companies that have the same fate.

Economic sanctions are the most effective non-military actions states can take against each others.

Short of military invasion what do you suggest EU does?

UK company -> UK plane

headquarters are in Dublin.

and the plane is registered in Poland

Consequence will be that Belarus can no longer divert planes and capture dissidents. They've also made themselves even more of a pariah.

Ukraine just closed air connection with Belarus. Latvia sent out Belarusian diplomats.

> This will increase costs to Belarusian airlines, which would be a problem to the regime.

First of all it'd be a problem to the people of Poland and Ukraine, but I guess virtue signalling matters more than real problems.

I don't think passenger airline companies have the authority to close the airspace of a country. That would have to be a political decision.

They certainly have the ability to decide on the route their planes take, if not others.

Don’t airlines pay for airspace utilization rights?