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The Ryanair security team should have known, and if the crew had been able to contact their companies Security team, they would have been better informed to make a judgement. As I am pretty sure the Security team of Ryanair would have known the geopolitical situation. The airline has failed both their crew and even more importantly their passengers, as there was no access for their crew to communicate with their Security team, to be able to assess if this was indeed a credible security threat.
"I didn't even know Bielorussia was a dictatorship (depending from the point of view)"
No it does not really depend on your point of view, just because you are ignorant on the issue, does not mean we need to go the "both sides of the story" route here.
My understanding is that this was Vilnius based crew, so unless they have not followed the news the last 9 months, they would know there are great tensions between Belarus, Russia and Lithuania at the moment, as most of the opposition to Lukashenko has fled to Lithuania, to be in safety.
The facts are the facts, the crew did not take the shortest route to safety. From the transcript it is reasonable to assume that the crew was hesitant, and unless there is more compelling evidence available, it does seem they got coerced by ATC to divert to a destination that most definitely was not the best Option available, and the penny pinching Ryanair has some part to play with how this all ended unfortunately.
