MOSCOW (Reuters) – A Russian government plane which is used to carry senior government officials, including the head of the FSB security service, landed in the Belarusian capital Minsk on Wednesday, flight tracking data showed.
This was its second such flight in just over a week. The same plane had made a quick trip to Belarus and back in the early hours of last Wednesday, tracking data showed last week.
The plane’s flights to Belarus, a Russian ally, coincide with waves of protests and strikes over what Belarusian demonstrators say was a rigged presidential election on Aug. 9.
Reuters could not determine who was aboard the Russian government plane, a Tupolev Tu-214, when it landed in Minsk from Moscow on Wednesday evening.
The Kremlin has said the situation in Belarus is an internal matter which should be resolved by Belarusians themselves and that it did not see the need to help Belarus militarily or otherwise for now.
Attention is focused on how Russia will respond to the biggest political crisis facing an ex-Soviet neighbour since 2014 in Ukraine, when Moscow intervened militarily after a friendly leader was toppled by protests.
(Reporting by Andrey Makhovsky in Minsk and Rinat Sagdiev in Moscow; Writing by Gabrielle Ttrault-Farber; Editing by Sujata Rao)
