THE European Union and the United States have been criticised for interfering in the internal affairs of Belarus, using the “unacceptable” grounding of a Ryanair plane to press for regime change.

EU leaders promised new sanctions on Belarus after a flight from Greece to Lithuania was grounded on Sunday and passenger Roman Protasevich, a Belarusian opposition journalist, was arrested.

Officials in Minsk claimed that they were responding to a bomb threat when they scrambled fighter jets, forcing Ryanair flight FR4978 to land in the Belarusian capital.

But EU officials accused Minsk of hijacking the plane. They backed banning Belarusian airlines from flying over EU territory and called on European airlines to avoid flying over Belarus.

EU leaders also asked member states to suspend operating permits for Belarus’s national airline Belavia.

Mr Protasevich faces terrorism charges for his reporting on protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, which began after contested election results last August.

But the journalist’s far-right connections have since been revealed: Mr Protasevich is reported to have travelled to Ukraine in 2014 to join the neonazi Azov Battalion during the Maidan protests.

He is said to have volunteered as a photographer and worked in a press capacity for the organisation.

Photographs circulating on social media appeared to show him participating in the tearing down of a statue of Lenin, while another appeared to show him wearing a Nazi SS helmet.

A number of opposition media organisations calling for the overthrow of Mr Lukashenko are accused of being funded by the US and its shady soft-power agency the National Endowment for Democracy.

Mr Protasevich’s Nexta Live channel on the Telegram instant messaging app is charged with playing a leading role in co-ordinating the attempted ouster of Mr Lukashenko. The channel has about 1.2 million subscribers.

The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) accused the US and EU of double standards on human rights, which it said they have previously used as the pretext for “dozens of imperialist interventions and wars.”

The Western powers supported neonazi organisations in Ukraine, “baptising them as activists,” a KKE statement said.

It highlighted the foiling of a recent coup attempt involving military forces in Belarus and a plan to assassinate Mr Lukashenko, saying they were “a reminder of interventions in Latin American countries.”

While branding the forced grounding of the Ryanair flight in Minsk unacceptable, the KKE said: “The people of Belarus themselves are the sole [people] responsible to choose their future and determine the political developments in their country, without foreign interventions that serve other purposes.”