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)