Anne Applebaum writes:

The Belarusian regime abused air-traffic-control procedures that are designed to inform pilots about genuine emergencies in order to kidnap a dissident. In other words, this is a story that belongs alongside the Russian use of radioactive poisons and nerve agents against enemies of the Kremlin in London and Salisbury, England; Saudi Arabia’s brutal murder of one of its citizens inside a consulate in Istanbul; Iranian assassinations of dissidents in the Netherlands and Turkey; and Beijing’s kidnapping and detention of Chinese nationals living abroad and foreign citizens of Chinese origin. The human-rights organization Freedom House calls these new practices “transnational repression,” and has compiled more than 600 examples.

All of these cases form part of what is becoming a new norm: Authoritarian states in pursuit of their enemies no longer feel the need to respect passports, borders, diplomatic customs, or—now—the rules of air-traffic control. In this new world, dictators are ever more prepared to arrest or murder political dissidents anywhere, no matter what citizenship they might have or which foreign laws or bureaucratic procedures might theoretically protect them. Sometimes these regimes put pressure on other countries to help them. Other times they kidnap people unassisted. The price they have to pay as a result, in sanctions or in bad relations with the outside world, clearly no longer bothers them.

This particular incident is notable because, unlike the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, Lukashenko has so few levers of influence abroad. Belarus has little trading clout, no important investments in New York or London, no oligarchs who own British soccer teams and help normalize the dictator’s rule overseas. That Lukashenko is now willing to falsely detain and possibly endanger a European-owned, European-registered airplane carrying mostly European Union citizens from one EU nation to another means that he is prepared for a total break with Europe—and that he is completely confident of Russian economic and political support when it happens. Already, the head of RT, the Russian state-sponsored international television channel, has tweeted that the hijacking makes her “envy” Belarus. Lukashenko, she wrote, “performed beautifully.” Another senior Russian official called the hijacking “feasible and necessary.” But that isn’t surprising: Autocrats supporting other autocrats who break international law is one more element of the new norm. [Continue reading…]