Member of the European Parliament Urmas Paet (Reform) says that European countries should reduce all possible contacts with the regime of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, and one way to do that is to send Belarusian diplomats out of the country. The strong potential actions against Belarus arise from the Belarusian government's diverting a Vilnius-bound commercial flight in order to arrest an opposition journalist on Sunday, May 23.
Authorities in the Latvian capital, Riga, have already exchanged the official red-green national flag of Belarus for the white-red-white national flag flown by protesters at the regime, at the World Ice Hockey Championships on Monday, and in response, Belarus expelled all Latvian embassy staff. Latvia riposted by doing the same, and has also left the white-red-white flag up the pole and removed the ice hockey governing body's flag instead, after the authority protested.