Political hockey: Belarus and Latvia mutually expelled all ambassadors
A huge scandal broke out today between Latvia and Belarus.
The reason for this was the demarche by Riga Mayor Martins Stakis, who, together with Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs, removed the Belarusian national flag from the flagpole where the banners of all the countries participating in the World Hockey Championship were located and hoisted a nationalist red-and-white flag in its place, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Among the banners of the hockey championship, we raise the flag of free Belarus! This flag was entrusted to me by political refugees from Belarus. A flag that symbolizes a regime that carries out state terrorism is inappropriate in the urban environment of Riga, so we removed it!” Stakis wrote on Twitter.
He explained that he had removed the national flag of Belarus in connection with yesterday’s incident, when an Irish airline plane made an emergency landing at Minsk airport due to a false report of mining. Among the passengers on the plane was an internationally wanted citizen of Belarus, Roman Protasevich, who last year coordinated mass unrest in Belarus through the extremist telegram channel Nekhta.
Because of this, the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia and a number of other European countries accused the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko of “terrorism”, who, according to them, staged a message about mining and allegedly forced the crew to land, raising a combat aircraft into the sky.
The reaction of official Minsk to the demarche in Riga followed immediately. The Ambassador of Latvia, Einars Semanis, was summoned to the Belarusian Foreign Ministry. The diplomat did not apologize for the mayor’s behavior.
“Indeed, it is so that the state flag was changed to, let’s call it a historical flag. This was a protest in connection with the incident that took place yesterday in Belarus in connection with the forced landing of the plane and the holding of the plane for 7 hours,” said Ambassador Semanis.
All this looks even more offensive if we remember that the hockey championship itself was supposed to take place in Belarus. But the International Federation banned Minsk from organizing matches due to the fact that the sports community was allegedly outraged by the harsh crackdown on protests that swept across Belarus after the presidential elections.
All this together led to Belarus expelling the Latvian ambassador. He was asked to leave the country within 24 hours. All diplomatic personnel, with the exception of one technical officer, are leaving the country along with the ambassador.
While they were still in Minsk, the loyal public hastened to organize a picket permitted by the authorities near the building of the Latvian embassy, at which the mayor of Riga was called a fascist and “Katyusha” was sung.
Belarusian Foreign Minister Vladimir Makei called the incident in Riga an act of state vandalism. He emphasized that so far no country has asked Belarus for information on the Ryanair incident, which has not stopped Western leaders from making harsh statements on this matter.
“Not specialists, I emphasize, but political uncles and aunts in the West who have power, levers of power, literally within 10-15 minutes after receiving information about this incident with the plane, they already began to make corresponding political statements. Naturally, with accusations against Belarus,” said Makei
Not even an hour had passed before Latvia expelled all Belarusian diplomats.
Political Hockey: Belarus and Latvia Mutually Expel All Ambassadors