London, Jun 2 (Bureau) UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday renewed his country’s support to NATO allies against any threat to their border coming from the East, and repeated his condemnation of Belarus for its “outrageous hijacking” of a Ryanair flight that led to the arrest of a journalist critical of President Alexander Lukashenko’s government. “What we want to do is make sure we work together and protect ourselves against cyber threats, against all the kinds of intimidation that some NATO members still feel on NATO’s eastern borders, and we work together to protect against that,” Johnson told reporters after meeting with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s general secretary Jens Stoltenberg at Downing Street.
The UK prime minister cited as an example of such “threats” the forced landing of a Ryanair flight in Minks on May 23, and said all NATO members will be wanting to stand together in protest against what happened and call for the release of Roman Protasevich, one of the founders of the Telegram channel Nexta, and his girlfriend. The NATO general secretary said that the Agenda 2030 that will be agreed at the June 14 summit in Brussels will address a wide range of challenges, including the bloc’s resilience in protecting critical infrastructure and technology and ways to strengthen deterrence and defence with higher levels of armed forces and more exercises.