On 23 May 2021, an activist couple – Roman Protasevich, an exiled activist and media blogger from Belarus, and Sofia Sapega, a Russian law student and rights advocate – boarded Ryanair Flight 4978 in Greece bound for Lithuania. After it entered his airspace, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko deployed a fighter jet to intercept the aircraft. Following a forced landing in Minsk, state security whisked Protasevich and Sapega into detention. Despite widespread international condemnation of Lukashenko’s actions, the two activists were charged separately as threats to Belarusian security and found guilty of inciting ‘mass unrest’. Protasevich was sentenced to eight years in prison and served two. It is widely believed that he was subjected to physical abuse and coerced into making apologetic confessions on state television. In 2022, Sapega was sentenced to six years, where she remains a political prisoner at the time of writing (in 2023).

The arrest of the Belarusian blogger and his girlfriend resonated with another multinational plot involving the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi a few years earlier. Khashoggi had been forced into exile in 2017 for criticising the monarchy in his home country of Saudi Arabia.