Brussels Faces Off With ‘Europe’s Last Dictator’

For decades, the president of Belarus, known as “Europe’s last dictator,” has been a thorn in the side of the continent’s democracies.

But the threat Alexander Lukashenko poses to European security suddenly grew more serious Sunday, when his security forces—with the help of a transparently false cover story and an armed MiG-29 fighter jet—forced a commercial airliner flying over Belarusian airspace to land in Minsk in order to arrest Roman Protasevich, a reporter associated with the opposition-in-exile who was on the flight.