Today, presidents of all three Baltic countries held remote meeting about Ryanair passenger flight illegally diverted by Belarus to its capital Minsk yesterday.
President of Latvia Egils Levits, President of Estonia Kersti Kaljulaid and President of Lithuania Gitanas Nausėda discussed the common position of all three Baltic states prior to European Council meeting later tonight in Brussels. All three heads of state strongly urged Belarus to immediately release the detained journalist and activist Roman Protasevich and his companion.
Presidents of the three Baltic countries agreed that yesterday’s incident can be considered a violation of international law and unlawful, and European Union (EU) should impose new, tighter sanctions against Belarus. They stressed that incidents like make travelling to Belarus unsafe. Egils Levits, Kersti Kaljulaid and Gitanas Nausėda mentioned that tonight’s European Council should close all flights to and from the European Union, which cross the Belarusian airspace. EU should also close its airspace to flights to and from Belarus by Belarusian airlines.
President of Latvia Egils Levits had already discussed the situation with Latvian Foreign Minister a day earlier and proposed to raise the plane hijacking issue at the UN Security Council because actions of Belarus are inconsistent with international aviation rules. President Kaljulaid told her Lithuanian and Latvian colleagues that Estonia, which currently holds a seat on the UN Security Council, also firmly believes that the UN Security Council should react to this incident and the matter will be included in the agenda of one of its meetings in near future.