The Guardian view on Belarus: a line has been crossed | Editorial posted at 18:12:59 UTC
The Guardian view on Belarus: a line has been crossed | Editorial
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- Early in World War II, Nazi Germany used its navy to isolate Britain from resupply by sea.
- Germany capital ships, like the battleship Bismarck, were an important part of that strategy.
- But it was Bismarck's destruction in May 1941 that solidified U-boats as Hitler's weapon of choice.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
On the night of May 18, 1941, the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen steamed out of its base at Gotenhafen (now Gdynia, Poland), followed five hours later by the Kriegsmarine's crown jewel, the battleship Bismarck.
Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were on a mission to wreak havoc on British merchant shipping. German U-boats were already very effective at this, but Grand Adm. Erich Raeder, head of the Kriegsmarine, hoped to demonstrate to Hitler the value of Germany's surface fleet in order to avoid future budget cuts.
What followed was one of the most intense naval searches in military history, the result of which convinced Hitler that U-boats, not capital ships, were the Kriegsmarine's best weapons.
Capital ships for commerce raiding
Sobotta/ullstein bild via Getty Images
Britain was in a very desperate situation in May 1941. It had fended off the Luftwaffe's relentless aerial onslaughts in the Battle of Britain but was still isolated and heavily reliant on supplies coming across the Atlantic.
The Kriegsmarine had been trying to block trans-Atlantic shipping routes since the war began, and its capital ships had played an important role in intercepting or sinking Allied shipping.
German surface ships also drew Royal Navy warships away from other duties, such as escorting convoys, and supported U-boats, which were then few in number.
Keystone/Getty Images
Happy with earlier success in Operation Berlin, Raeder planned another commerce raid.
To maximize damage, the raid was to include Germany's four best capital ships: battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which were sister ships, and Bismarck and its sister ship, Tirpitz.
But Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were damaged by constant RAF attacks while being repaired in port in France, keeping them out of action for months. Tirpitz's crew was also still being trained.
Prinz Eugen, not as well armed or armored as a battleship, was the only available ship capable of accompanying Bismarck. Not wanting to delay the operation any longer, German commanders ordered the ships into the Atlantic.
Battle of the Denmark Strait
ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images
The mission, codenamed Operation Rheinübung, was led by Adm. Günther Lütjens, the commander of Operation Berlin.
Lütjens was ordered to focus primarily on merchant raiding and to avoid fighting British capital ships if possible. But Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were discovered by the Royal Navy, which attempted to intercept the ships as they sailed through Denmark Strait and into the Atlantic on May 24.
The British force consisted of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser HMS Hood, which was widely considered the pride of the Royal Navy.
The British ships were no match for Bismarck, which was newer and better armored. Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were able to fire full broadsides at the two British ships.
"When the big guns fired, the entire ship staggered," Heinrich Kuhnt, a sailor on the Bismarck, recalled after the war. "It felt like it was bending. It was pushed sideways in the water. It was amazing."
Minutes into the battle, one of Bismarck's 15-inch shells hit one of Hood's magazines. An enormous column of fire erupted from the battlecruiser, followed by a massive explosion that tore it in two.
"The ship broke into pieces," Otto Schlenzka, a sailor on Prinz Eugen, recalled. "We were sure an explosion of that kind must have killed everybody."
Hood went down with 1,415 sailors, all but three of its crew. Prince of Wales was also heavily damaged and had to withdraw. The Germans suffered no losses.
Bismarck's end
British Royal Navy
Shocked by the violent destruction of the Hood, the Royal Navy committed nearly all of its available capital ships in the area to finding and destroying Bismarck.
Though it suffered no casualties in the battle, Bismarck received a number of hits that ruptured a fuel tank and caused flooding.
Lütjens, aware of the Royal Navy's numerical superiority and of the danger of sailing a damaged warship, terminated the operation.
Prinz Eugen was ordered to continue commerce raiding on its own while the Bismarck headed for Nazi-occupied France.
British Royal Navy
Bismarck briefly evaded its pursuers, but a British reconnaissance aircraft, flown by a US Navy pilot, found it on May 26.
Subsequent torpedo attacks from Swordfish carrier planes disabled Bismarck's rudder, forcing it into a continuous turn.
With the Royal Navy closing in, Lütjens sent a final message to Berlin: "Ship unmaneuverable. We shall fight to the last shell. Long live the Führer."
On May 27, two British battleships and two heavy cruisers attacked Bismarck. They fired over 2,800 shells in a little less than two hours, hitting the German battleship some 400 times. Bismarck was left dead in the water.
The Germans detonated scuttling charges to sink the ship, while British heavy cruiser HMS Dorsetshire fired torpedoes to finish it off. Only 115 of Bismarck's 2,221-man crew survived.
U-boat superiority
Bettmann/Getty Images
Operation Rheinübung was a complete failure. Not only had the pride of the Kriegsmarine been sunk with nearly all hands, Prinz Eugen was unable to sink any merchant ships, meaning the primary objective was never achieved.
In the following weeks, the Royal Navy set about destroying the network German ships that refueled, resupplied, and rearmed German capital ships in the Atlantic. The result was the Kriegsmarine's almost complete reliance on U-boats during the rest of the Battle of the Atlantic.
In the end, the U-boats were the Kriegsmarine's most effective weapons. From September to December 1939, they sank 110 Allied vessels, while German capital ships only sank about a dozen.
Between July and October 1940, a period known as the "first happy time," by German submariners, U-boats sank nearly 300 ships carrying over a million tons of cargo.
Between January and August 1942, the "second happy time," U-boats sank another 600 ships carrying 3 million tons of cargo.
Hitler never ordered his capital ships into the Atlantic again, sending them to Norway or the Baltic instead. The Germans ramped up production of U-boats, which were easier to build than capital ships, and thousands of Allied ships were sunk before the war's end in 1945.
When exiled Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya took a Ryanair flight from Athens to Lithuania’s capital Vilnius, she wasn’t overly concerned about her safety. She couldn’t have predicted that just a week later her home country would scramble a fighter jet to force that same passenger flight to land and arrest a dissident journalist.
“We could not imagine that this regime would make such an act, to endanger the lives of hundreds of passengers, just to kidnap one person,” Tikhanovskaya told TIME, speaking from Vilnius on Monday. Of her own recent flight on that route, she said: “we never even thought about security. We were absolutely sure that we were safe.”
For those fighting to end the 27-year rule of President Alexander Lukashenko, who some call “Europe’s last dictator,” any sense of safety within the E.U. has vanished since Sunday’s nightmarish detour of the commercial airliner, which has triggered the bloc to announce stiffer sanctions against Belarus.
Ryanair, one of Europe’s most popular budget airlines, had almost reached its destination of Vilnius on Sunday night, when a Belarussian MiG-29 fighter jet sped towards it in mid-air, and ordered its pilots to divert to the country’s capital Minsk. Authorities told the pilots there was a security threat on board. Once the aircraft was on the ground at Minsk Airport, Belarus security agents forcibly dragged journalist Roman Protasevich, 26, and his girlfriend, law student Sofia Sapega, 23, off the plane to be detained in the country’s notorious jails. Three other passengers—believed to be from Belarus’s KGB intelligence service—also disembarked in Minsk.
While the incident was deeply shocking for Tikhanovskaya, she says it is the latest escalation in a pattern of behavior that has become all too familiar. “People are facing kidnapping from the streets every day,” she says. “Thousands of people are in jail. The situation in Belarus is deteriorating.”
She thinks Lukashenko has come to believe that he faces no serious consequences for his actions. “This event showed that the escalation is a result of impunity and the lack of attention,” she says. “Lukashenko thinks nobody can do anything, so he thinks, ‘I’ll do anything I want.’”
‘No one feels safe anymore’
Protasevich’s arrest is part of a sweeping crackdown on whatever non-government media is left in Belarus. Last week the country’s financial police raided the offices of Tut.BY, the biggest independent news service in Belarus, and opened an investigation into its operations.
As the cofounder of Nexta, a hugely popular news channel on the Telegram platform run by Belarus dissidents, Protasevich was a big target. The channel has posted hundreds of videos and photos detailing the crackdown on protesters and incidents of torture in prisons.
In December, Nexta’s other founder, Stsiapan Putsila, told TIME that hundreds of Belarussians were risking arrest by smuggling images to Nexta. “It is very dangerous for them to send this information,” said Putsila, who now lives in the Polish capital Warsaw. “But their will to share the information is more significant.”
The exiled opposition politicians are deeply on edge after Sunday night’s arrests. Several are now based in Vilnius, just a three-hour drive from Belarus. “I did not sleep last night because I was so nervous,” says Franak Viacorka, Tikhanovskaya’s senior advisor, by phone from Vilnius on Monday. “No one feels safe anymore. They will not stop.”
Despite three rounds of E.U. sanctions against Belarus, officials have previously stopped short of sweeping, tough measures against Lukashenko’s inner circle, in part because of divisions within Europe over how to deal with Belarus’s giant neighbor and ally, Russia. With Belarus on its knees economically, Russian President Vladimir Putin granted Lukashenko a $1.5-billion bailout last September, helping the authoritarian leader to hold on to power.
The crisis erupted last August, when Lukashenko declared himself the overwhelming winner of Belarus’s presidential elections, although many in Belarus believed Tikhanovskaya had easily won. Tikhanovskaya’s campaign had effectively created its own election fraud detection system, by having its voters snap photos of their completed ballots, thus proving her victory.
Tikhanovskaya, 38, a former English teacher, jumped into the race last May, after security police arrested her husband Sergei Tikhanovsky, thwarting his presidential run.
A political neophyte, Tikhanovskaya packed huge rallies, mobilizing thousands to march in protest, before fleeing last August across the border into Vilnius, where she now lives with her two children.
Her husband remains in jail in Minsk, leaving Tikhanovskaya to negotiate with world leaders and diplomats over tough sanctions against Lukashenko. She held talks on Monday with U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and E.U. foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell, urging a strong international response to Sunday’s plane diversion. She told TIME she plans to travel to Washington “as soon as COVID restrictions are lifted,” she says.
Read more: How a Belarusian Teacher and Stay-at-Home Mom Came to Lead a National Revolt
Amid global furor over the incident, Ryanair came under pressure to explain why its pilots landed the plane in Minsk. In a muted initial statement posted on Twitter on Sunday, the company said the pilots “were notified by Belarus ATC [air traffic control] of a potential security threat on board and were instructed to divert to the nearest airport, Minsk.” It made no mention of the fact that Belarus security forces had seized two of its passengers. The company updated its statement on Monday, this time condemning Belarus’s action as “an act of aviation piracy,” while its CEO Michael O’Leary called the incident “state-sponsored hijacking.”
Lithuania’s government opened an investigation into Belarus on Monday and could possibly bring charges of plane hijacking, forced disappearance of a person and violating international aviation treaties.
Belarus became top of E.U. leaders’ agenda as they gathered in Brussels on Monday evening to commence a two-day summit. E.U. leaders demanded the immediate release of Pratasevich and Sapega and agreed to economic sanctions, saying the bloc would expand the list of individuals and entities that would be targeted. They also imposed a ban on Belarusian airlines using E.U. airspace and airports and called on carriers based in the 27-nation bloc to avoid flying over Belarus.
Ramunas Stanionis, advisor to Lithuania’s former Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, who heads the Belarus policy group in the E.U. Parliament, says some E.U. officials had become frustrated by the months of debate over what action to take against Lukashenko. Speaking to TIME by phone from Brussels before the sanctions were announced, he questioned why the E.U. had been slow to act, but speculated that the Ryanair incident could be a catalyst. “It is an act of state terrorism,” he said.
Earlier on Monday AirBaltic—an airline operated by the small E.U. nation of Latvia—said it would no longer fly to Belarus. And in Minsk, Belarus authorities held a Lufthansa plane on the tarmac for 90 minutes, claiming a terrorist threat, before finally releasing the Frankfurt-bound aircraft.
‘Brazen and shocking act’ raises questions
In the shocked aftermath of theRyanair incident on Monday, one crucial question remained: What might have happened, if the pilots had disobeyed the instructions on Sunday to divert their plane to Minsk?
Belarus experts and opposition figures believe the pilots had been told that if they failed to take the plane to Minsk, the Boeing 737-8AS aircraft would be shot out of the sky by the Russian-built fighter jet that had cornered it in the air.
That would have resulted in major loss of life, with 171 passengers on board. “They were ready to shoot down the Ryanair plane,” says Tikhanovskaya’s senior advisor Viacorka. “The goal was to forcibly land the plane,” he says.
Data from the website FlightRadar24 shows how the plane veered sharply off course just about two minutes—less than 20 miles—from entering the safety of E.U. airspace in Lithuania. The plane was far closer to its destination Vilnius than it was to Minsk, when it made a sudden turn South towards the Belarus capital.
Analyzing the data, Vadim Lukashevich, an aviation expert in Moscow, said in a Facebook post he was convinced that the Ryanair pilots had been told they would die if they did not divert. “I am absolutely sure that the crew of the passenger airliner turned around only after receiving a notification from the Belarusian fighter that, in case of disobedience, it would open fire before the passenger plane left the airspace of Belarus,” Lukashevich wrote on Facebook on Sunday night. Ryanair has not commented on whether the pilots were threatened with an armed attack in the air.
The FlightRadar24 data also showed that the plane was flying higher and faster than normal for the final minutes of its trip, suggesting that it may have been trying to outfly the fighter jet. That likely made for a terrifying ordeal for the commercial pilots who had assumed they were on a routine journey between two European cities, both capitals of NATO member countries—and technically a domestic flight within the borderless, 27-country E.U.
“We don’t know if they really would have been shot down,” said Stanionis, the policy advisor in the E.U. Parliament. “But it is just a matter of pressing a button on a MiG-29.” In addition, the operation appeared to be a complex mission, well-planned likely from the top ranks of Belarus’s military—and perhaps Lukashenko himself. “If the object was to detain Raman [Protasevich] you [would] need to know when he is boarding, have access to registration systems, plan all the possible communication with ground control centers,” Stanionis says. “You need to look at different scenarios, and coordinate with air forces.”
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the incident a “brazen and shocking act,” and demanded an international investigation.
But Tikhanovskaya says action is needed as much as investigations, especially given the dire conditions in Belarus’s prisons.
“There is sexual abuse, women are strip searched, there is stress positions for hours, cells are overcrowded,” she says, listing conditions that have been reported by former and current prisoners. “People from democratic countries cannot even imagine,” she says.
Despite the increased danger—even in the air between E.U. cities—Tikhanovskaya says she intends to continue traveling to meetings to pressure foreign leaders to take action against Belarus. “I have a row of official visits in the near future,” she says, declining to name the countries. “I will not delay any official visits.”
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The abduction of an opposition blogger from a commercial Ryanair flight sends a chilling message to dissidents. The west’s response must be swift and robust
In recent months, Europe has watched impotently from the sidelines as Alexander Lukashenko brutally reasserted his illegitimate authority over the population of Belarus. The protest movement that threatened the survival of his regime after fraudulent 2020 elections has, for the time being, been subjugated: a combination of state violence, media suppression, incarceration and torture has battered a people into temporary submission. The modest sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States have had limited effect, while deepening the dependency of “Europe’s last dictator” on Vladimir Putin’s largesse and goodwill.
Calibrating a response to state repression that will not play into Mr Putin’s hands has not been easy. But for the EU in particular, Monday’s extraordinary abduction of Roman Protasevich, an opposition journalist based in Lithuania, must be the catalyst for a stepchange in strategy. Along with his girlfriend, Mr Protasevich was abducted from Ryanair flight FR4978, which was crossing Belarusian airspace while flying from Athens to Vilnius. It appears he was followed onto the commercial flight by members of the Belarusian KGB. Passengers have reported Mr Protasevich’s panic and terror as the flight was diverted to Minsk on spurious grounds, accompanied by a MiG-29 fighter jet. The opposition movement’s main figurehead, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, has said that he may face the death penalty.
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Страны Евросоюза запретят белорусским авиакомпаниям полеты над своей территорией в ответ на принудительную посадку накануне в Минске самолета Ryanair с журналистом Романом Протасевичем на борту
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