Russian President Vladimir Putin offered a sweeping display of support Friday for his embattled ally in Belarus, as the West looked to further isolate Alexander Lukashenko’s regime over its interception of jetliner to arrest an opposition journalist.
A meeting in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi served as reminder of Russia’s role as a political and economic lifeline for Lukashenko, who has held power since 1994 but faced a wave of protests last year after an election that opposition groups and Western officials claimed was rigged.
His pariah status deepened after Belarus claimed it received a bomb threat for a Ryanair plane and scrambled a fighter jet to divert the flight – bound from Athens to Vilnius, Lithuania – to Minsk’s airport. Prominent dissident Roman Protasevich, who had been living in exile, was arrested upon landing and now faces a 15-year prison sentence in Belarus.
In Sochi, Putin made no immediate comments on possible steps to strengthen Russia’s commitments to Belarus. But the cozy body language and banter – even joking about swimming in the Black Sea – conveyed a message that Russia was fully behind Lukashenko.
“Thank you for coming to this meeting, we agreed on this even before the next round of …,” Putin said as he turned to Lukashenko, who jumped in to finish the sentence: “A surge of emotions.”
“Yes, a surge of emotions,” Putin agreed.
“We have things to talk about even without these events,” added Putin, who also made noted of a forced landing in Austria of a plane carrying Bolivia’s President Evo Morales in 2013 – as part of the hunt for fugitive U.S. secret-spiller Edward Snowden.
“There was nothing, just silence,” Putin said.
Lukashenko, making a dig at his Western critics, said he brought “documents” to brief Putin.
“I will show you so that you understand what is happening, so that you understand what kind of people these are,” Lukashenko said.
Belarus said there was a purported in-flight bomb threat against the Ryanair flight, but an email cited by Belarusian authorities containing the alleged threat was sent after the plane was diverted, Swiss email provider ProtonMail said Thursday, further challenging the Belarusian regime’s version of events.
In another show of Russia’s backing for Belarus, two European airlines, Air France and Austrian Airlines, said they had to cancel flights to Moscow on Thursday because Russian aviation authorities did not approve new flight paths that avoided Belarus’s airspace. E.U. leaders Monday barred the bloc’s airlines from flying over Belarus.
Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, wrote on Twitter that the Kremlin’s tolerance of Lukashenko “hurts Russian interests.”
Moscow and Minsk have drawn closer to each other as both countries’ relations with the West have grown increasingly adversarial. Putin is a known opponent of regime change and prefers the stability of a long-serving ruler in a country that has so far served as an allied buffer between Russia and the West.