The new, fifth in a row, package of sanctions against Belarus will include both personal restrictions and measures against Belarusian companies. According to the high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy Josep Borrell, the details of this package will be agreed in the coming days. One of the planned measures was announced by the Irish authorities. According to Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, the EU will terminate the aircraft leasing contracts concluded with the Belarusian state-owned Belavia airline. Coveney noted that the Belarusian air carrier has leased 17 aircraft through Irish companies. If Belavia refuses to return the planes, then it will have to answer in court, the minister threatened.
The need to introduce new sanctions against the Belarusian state air carrier was discussed in Brussels at the community summit in late October.
Earlier, at the end of May, the EU imposed a number of tough restrictions on Belavia after the incident with the forced landing of a Ryanair plane in Minsk and the arrest of the ex-editor-in-chief of the NEXTA Telegram channel recognized as extremist in Belarus, Roman Protasevich. Then the Belarusian airline was banned from using the airspace and airports of the EU. But at the same time, the European Union did not include a single Belarusian airline in the sanctions list itself, so Belavia could still receive financial and economic resources from individuals and companies from the European Union. This is all the more important as the carrier owns only 9 of the 29 aircraft in use. According to ch-aviation, it has leased 20 of them from Irish, Danish, Romanian and American companies.
As the program director of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) Ivan Timofeev notes, Brussels shows Minsk that it is serious and gives time to the Belarusian authorities to take the “necessary” measures.
European officials, Timofeev explains, took a break to develop a new legal mechanism. The existing one, the expert believes, no longer corresponds to the problematic, since the current sanctions against Minsk are imposed in connection with the results of the 2020 elections and the suppression of protests, and there is nothing about migrants there, the expert concludes.
Late in the evening of November 15, Alexander Lukashenko had a telephone conversation with Angela Merkel, who is still acting as German Chancellor. According to TASS, during a 50-minute conversation, the heads of state discussed the migration crisis.
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