I was commenting on the yesterdays incident over Belorussian airspace in my previous post. It appears that I may have been wrong assuming Belorussia had access to the passenger records, this appears to be a classical intelligence operation, involving boots on the ground.
Russias response on it can best be described as "whataboutism", pointing towards the Evo Morales grouding incident.
“It is shocking that the West calls the incident in Belarusian airspace ‘shocking’,” Foreign Ministry spokewoman Maria Zakharova wrote on Facebook. “Either (they) should be shocked by ... the forced (landing) in Austria of the Bolivian president’s plane at the request of the United States ... Or (they) should not be shocked by similar behaviour by others.”
For those who have forgotten that incident, the then vice president of the USA (now president) was doing whatever was in his power to get a political dissident (Edward Snowden), suspected to be a passenger on the presidents flight, turned over to the USA. The plane had to land in Austria, and the Austrians checked that Snowden was not on board.
It's a red herring. Of course the Evo Morales grounding incident was shocking - but so was the yesterdays arrest.
Sources
Wikipedia (links inlined) and various news sites. The quote is taken from Reuters
Image credits
Evo Morales - Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores from Perú, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Edward Snowden - Laura Poitras / Praxis Films, [CC BY 3.0])(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons