Why sanctions against Putin and his allies don’t work

An ‘act of aviation piracy’ was how Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary described the forcible grounding of one of his planes in Minsk by Belarusian authorities in order to arrest a dissident who was on board. ‘A shocking assault on civil aviation and an assault on international law,’ said the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. The Taoiseach Micheál Martin, en route to Brussels for an emergency meeting, called for EU heads of state to deliver a ‘very firm and strong response’ to Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko. But what response can the West actually make that will put an end to lawless behaviour by Lukashenko — and, more importantly, by his on-and-off ally Vladimir Putin? Where to hit where it really hurts?

The EU’s initial reaction was to begin suspending the licence of Belarus’s national airline, Belavia, and to call for a ban on all flights from Europe to Minsk. As an opening shot, that seems at first glance to be reasonably proportional. Except that it’s not Lukashenko or his security chiefs who will suffer. Nearly 60 top Belarusian officials — including Lukashenko himself — have already been personally sanctioned after last summer’s brutal crackdowns on dissent and are already banned from travelling or owning assets in Europe. The Belarusian citizens who will be worst affected by the new flight ban are likely to be the most international and best-educated. Both Lukashenko and Putin currently forbid hundreds of thousands of their own citizens (mostly security service personnel) from travelling to the West, so the EU ban would merely complete the job by insulating ordinary citizens from the corrupting influence of foreign travel.

‘If you really want to punish Luka[shenko],give every young [Belarusian] a plane ticket and a Schengen visa,’ wrote an anonymous user of the Telegram messaging service, where the arrested activist Roman Protasevich worked on two influential news channels.