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)