The passenger plane rises into the air.
He almost reaches the destination airport when a request is received from the controller to land.
Fighters rise into the air.
When the board sits down, the special services detain one of the passengers.
And while the rest are swearing, calling home ("dear, the plane has been planted, God knows how much more we can keep going here") and demand compensation, this passenger is taken straight for interrogation.
This is 2016, the passenger's name is Armen Martirosyan. The plane belonged to the Belavia company and landed in Kiev. Martirosyan was suspected of having links with Russia and organizing riots in Ukraine at the behest of the Kremlin. The scandalous episode ended, in general, with nothing: the passenger was released from the SBU a few hours later, and the then President of Ukraine Poroshenko apologized to the permanent Belarusian leader.
But the sediment remained. Now official Minsk says that this is a chain of coincidences. They say that the dispatcher received a message about mining, handed it to the board, the pilots, according to all the rules, sat down at the nearest airport, and Roman was among the passengers by accident. Well, maybe ... Who knows, maybe there was a message, and who sent it is also unclear, there are many interested in the scandal. Or maybe then, in 2016, Alexander Grigorievich tied a knot in memory and remembered this combination for the future.
Now, when Roman Protasevich, who is considered a terrorist in his homeland, returned to Minsk in a similar way, the Internet community was divided into two camps.
Some believe that there has been an unprecedented violation of international law, a seizure and a terrorist attack, and call for the Belarusian president to be immediately handed over to all possible anathemas.
Others congratulate the Belarusian KGB on a brilliant operation that has no analogues.
With all my desire, I cannot join either one or these.
If this is an operation, then there is nothing unique about it.
The first case I know was in 2004, when a private plane was forcibly landed in the United States, on which a Russian citizen, a member of the Federation Council and a former deputy minister, Andrei Vavilov, was flying.
He, like Protasevich, was taken for interrogation directly from the airport.
In 2012, Turkey landed a flight from Moscow to Damascus.
In 2017, the British accompanied the flight of the same Ryanair from Kaunas - however, they did not detain anyone and (apparently) did not find anything on board, although they searched everyone.
Finally, in 2013, the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales landed in Austria.
Only because they believed that Edward Snowden was flying with him.
This case is important for us not from the point of view that the "civilized world", by the right of force, casually humiliated the head of a sovereign state.
What matters is who they were looking for on that plane.
Snowden, whom even some Americans consider a fighter for free speech, who revealed important secrets to the world.
Snowden, who, if he was born later, and not in America, but somewhere in the CIS, would most likely start an anonymous Telegram channel and merge all his finds there.
But for the US authorities, Snowden is a terrorist and a traitor.
Accidental or not, Lukashenka is right or wrong, he is taking revenge or playing another chess game, finally, the Belarusian special services or, say, the European ones came up with a mysterious letter about mining, in order to drain Protasevich in this way, pull the Belarusian protest out of the American sphere of influence or return to their own. we won't know anymore.
Obviously, nothing new is happening and the actions of the players are prompted by the logic of the surrounding world, in which "everything is relative" and in which we all have existed for more than one decade.
When the US forces a plane to land, this is "democracy" and "good with fists" for some and lawlessness for others.
The Ukrainian army, which is shooting Donbass, is "warriors of light" for one side and war criminals for the other.
The same list includes Crimea and the bombing of Yugoslavia, here comes the Arab-Israeli conflict and much, much, much.
All the curses, all the sanctions that will now fall on the "last dictator" will not be for the unexpected landing of the Ryanair board, and not even for Protasevich.
They will be for the fact that he dared to play a game that was previously only allowed to be played by big uncles, or (as with Ukraine) with the permission of big uncles.
And Lukashenka's fault will be that he simply found himself on the wrong side of the barricades.
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.