“A page from Putin’s playbook” on how Moscow is using Vucic to threaten peace in the region

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic wants to project a modest image, but his vision of a Serbian world has profound implications for peace in the Balkans. The West continues to see him as a negotiating partner, even if he seems like a page out of Vladimir Putin’s playbook.

But anyone who understands a little Serbian and can read between the lines, who follows the noise of private regime broadcasters: They may come to a very different conclusion.

Namely, that Vučić has all the characteristics of an instigator [of the conflict].

Spiegel International writes that Vucic’s foreign policy strategy is nothing more than a balancing act. Although he stresses the importance of Serbia’s relations with Brussels and Washington, he maintains ties with Moscow and Beijing. Belgrade continues to refuse to participate in the sanctions imposed on Russia by the West in response to the invasion of Ukraine – while harassment of Russian opposition figures who have fled to Serbia is on the rise.

At the same time, the situation in the region seems to be getting out of control. In Kosovo, dozens of NATO soldiers involved in the KFOR peacekeeping mission in Kosovo were injured in clashes with members of the Serb minority loyal to Vucic in late May. In Bosnia, a referendum is expected later this year to decide whether the Serb minority region of Republika Srpska (RS) will secede. And in NATO member Montenegro, Serb-oriented forces appear poised to take control of the government.

The United States was sanctioned early last week against four senior RS politicians, including the Serb representative to the Bosnian presidency. These convictions followed similar sanctions against Aleksandar Vulin, the head of Serbia’s intelligence service.

According to a July statement from the U.S. Treasury Department, which imposed the sanctions, Vulin engaged in transnational organized crime (and illicit drug trafficking) operations. In addition, it said he “supported Russia’s malign activities that threaten the security and stability of the Western Balkans.”

Vulin is considered a spokesman for President Vučić and a supporter of the concept of Serbian world.

The only way for stability in the Balkans is for all Serbs to live together in a single nation, Vulin believes.

Vulin says about what the president himself cannot speak so openly: that the Serbian regime should function properly as close as possible relations between all Serbs inside and outside the country’s borders.

The Kremlin’s version of the Serbian world is called the Russian world and served Vladimir Putin as a justification for the invasion of Georgia and Ukraine.

Is Moscow using Vučić as an instrument to spread instability beyond Ukraine and into the heart of Europe? Polls seem to suggest that such a strategy could bear fruit. Although EU accession negotiations have been underway in Belgrade for nearly a decade, more than half of Serbian citizens say they would vote against EU membership in a referendum. Moreover, 45 percent of respondents in Demostat’s June poll say Putin is the best world leader – with Chinese President Xi Jinping in a (distant) second place.

Vucic sees himself as an advocate for all Serbs, including those living in Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The powerful Serbian Orthodox Church plays a central role in his calculation, given the strength of the ties that bind 15 million Orthodox Serbs worldwide.

A mosaic from Gazprom

As a result, Vucic embraces the same clergy who shunned despot Slobodan Milosevic, himself a fan of Great Serbia ideology, in the 1990s. Even under Milosevic’s regime, Vucic was in the government, serving as information minister and media manager.

Those who want to learn more about the ambitions of the president and an important part of the Serbian elite would be well advised to go to the center of Belgrade, where the huge Church of St. Sava is located. The gilded place of worship, dedicated to the country’s patron saint and planned since 1926, is now almost completed. An earlier conclusion was thwarted first by the fascists and then by the communists.

The mosaic work inside the dome was financed by the Russian company Gazprom, and the president of Serbia watched it in 2019, when Putin seemed to insert three tiles into the mosaic image of Christ the Savior – appropriately held in red, white and blue colors of the Russian and Serbian flags.

The Church plays an important role in the ideas of the Vučić regime. In May, at the height of the mass protests, the patriarch joined the president for lunch before praising him. Anyone who, like Vucic, “does everything for the good of Serbia” has his full support, Porfirije said. It was a blessing from above for a leader who had faced some headwinds because of the mass killings in Serbia.

And every time Vucic is put under internal pressure, he seems to respond by unleashing his violence-prone supporters in the Serb-majority region of northern Kosovo.

Kosovo is the Gordian knot in the European web and Vučić’s trump card in the battle for Balkan supremacy.

Legions of diplomats from Brussels and Washington have failed to resolve the impasse.

“Kosovo is as important to our church as the Vatican is to Catholics,” says Porfirije, as a nun in a black robe kisses his hand at the Gracanica monastery. The patriarch is the spiritual head of all Orthodox Serbs worldwide. As a rule, he does not answer questions, preferring to preach.

The newspaper writes that Vucic regularly jeopardizes relations with Kosovo from Belgrade – whether by sending Serbian troops to the Kosovo border or by insulting his Albanian negotiating partner, Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti./The Geopost/