Russia is playing with fire in the Balkans

How Putin's power play threatens Europe

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the start of the Yugoslav wars, Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. Although the Balkan states moved toward democratic governance and integration with NATO and the European Union in the immediate aftermath of the wars, continued neglect by the West has contributed to a dramatic setback in recent years. Now Russian President Vladimir Putin is seizing his opportunity and using the former Yugoslav states as the next battleground to weaken NATO and the European Union.

Putin’s efforts to push the Balkans to the brink are part of his mission to re-establish Russia as a global power broker. Similar to the Kremlin’s strategy in the Caucasus, Russia’s goal in the Balkans is to escalate tensions so that it can position itself as the sole regional mediator and guarantor of security. It also aims to demonstrate that neither NATO, the EU, nor their members are reliable partners for any of the Balkan countries. While Moscow also continues its military buildup near the Ukrainian border, its influence campaign in the Balkans serves as another theater for challenging the West.

For many in the West, Putin’s strategy is confusing. These analysts see the Balkans as a geopolitical backwater; they don’t understand what Russia has to gain by intervening in the region. As the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center put it, “The Balkans are not a major battleground in the Russia-West confrontation.”

The Balkans should not be dismissed so easily. Russia sees the region as the soft underbelly of Europe. Putin’s overarching goal is to shift the balance of power in Europe to Moscow’s advantage, and the Balkans are part of that strategy. Moscow has launched information operations to stoke ethnic tensions and encourage protests, cemented arms deals, embedded itself in critical energy infrastructure, and exploited religious and cultural ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Serbian Orthodox Church to its advantage in the region.

Russia’s efforts have been helped immensely by the EU’s weak response. Despite many years and billions of euros spent preparing the Balkans for EU integration, the effort has stalled. The EU has not expanded since Croatia’s accession in 2013, and despite promises of membership for the “Western Balkans six” – Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia – talks have for all practical purposes been frozen. Harmed by challenges as diverse as Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise of far-right groups and the migrant crisis in Europe, enlargement appears to be on indefinite hold. This failure has made the Balkans an obvious target for Putin.

During the last Balkan crisis in the 1990s, Russia was too weak to intervene militarily. Instead, it was limited to a peacekeeping mission after the Kosovo war in 1999, from which it decided to withdraw in 2003. But there should be no doubt that even then, the Russian government saw NATO’s expansion into Eastern Europe as a significant national security threat. Now, with Russia’s relatively stronger economy and military, the Kremlin sees an opportunity to reverse NATO’s advance by targeting the former Yugoslav states. Western Europe was asleep at the wheel the last time war broke out in the Balkans – the risk is too high that it will ignore the region this time.

The Balkan Lighter

Endemic corruption in the Balkan countries has exposed cracks that Moscow has exploited to advance its own agenda. As the former Yugoslav states transitioned from socialism to free-market economies after the 1990s, kleptocracy and illegal privatization took root. According to Freedom House, the Western Balkan countries are all becoming “partly free.” Putin is using corruption to drive economic, ethnic, and religious wedges into Balkan societies.

Serbia acts as a key player in the Kremlin’s bid for the Balkans. Both the government and the church maintain a loyalty to Moscow that is underpinned by centuries of shared religious and cultural ties – as well as by the mutual isolation of Serbia and Russia from contemporary Western powers. The Serbian government has called for the creation of a “Serbian world” – a Balkan parallel to Putin’s “Russian world” – designed to unite all Serbs under a common cultural framework. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has more immediate strategic interests in Russia’s intervention, as the chaos in the region will allow him to establish himself as a force for stability ahead of his re-election campaign in 2022. To ensure that the elections go in their favor, Serbia and Russia recently pledged to work together to combat mass protests and “color revolutions” emanating from the West.

Russia responds to Serbian loyalty through generous support for the Serbian military. Since 2018, Serbia’s defense budget has nearly doubled, and it leads all Balkan states in defense-related spending. Despite threats of U.S. sanctions against Serbia, Moscow sent an S-400 missile system to Serbia in 2019 for a military exercise. The Kremlin stepped it up further this year when it allowed Serbia to contract Pantsir-S1M air defense systems. Serbia also hosts a Russian-run “humanitarian center” that serves as an intelligence-gathering facility, located near Camp Bondsteel — NATO’s main base in Kosovo.

Moscow has openly threatened Balkan countries that have sought to strengthen their security ties with the West. Moscow tried to disrupt a 2018 referendum on NATO membership in North Macedonia, and its ambassador declared the country a “legitimate target” if tensions between NATO and Russia escalated (the country became a member in 2020). In neighboring Montenegro, Moscow backed a coup in 2016, shortly before its successful bid to join NATO.

Russia is well aware that religion in the Balkans has always been important in fueling conflict. In Montenegro, the Kremlin promotes pro-Russian policies through the Serbian Orthodox Church, which has denigrated the concept of distinct Montenegrin and Serbian national identities and has intervened in politics on Moscow’s behalf. Working through the church, Russia organized mass protests last year and replaced an uncooperative government with a pro-Russian leadership.

The Balkans’ most explosive flashpoints are Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although Kosovo’s population is more than 90 percent ethnic Albanian, Serbs see the country as an ancestral homeland that contains some of the holiest sites of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Just as the civil war that erupted over tensions between different religious and ethnic groups in the early 1990s, the Kremlin is now using the Orthodox Church to destabilize the country and the wider region. The Russian Orthodox Church has escalated repeated disputes over religious sites, most recently expressing concern about “the fate of Christian shrines in Kosovo” following heightened tensions between Kosovo and Serbia.

Moscow has also made it clear that diplomatic recognition by the United Nations of Kosovo's independence from Serbia will be impossible without Russian approval. Putin often mentions Kosovo to justify Russia's annexation of Crimea, arguing that Western recognition of the country's secession from Serbia created a precedent that legitimizes unilateral declarations of independence by other territories.

Brussels has failed to make progress towards Serbia’s recognition of Kosovo, just as US President Donald Trump’s 2020 “Washington Agreement” failed to make substantial progress on the core issues of the dispute. KFOR, the NATO peacekeeping force stationed in Kosovo, has similarly struggled to maintain stability. In September, the disputed Kosovo-Serbia border erupted into protests over a ban on vehicles with Serbian license plates entering Kosovo. This resulted in a blockade and a show of air power by the Serbs and the deployment of Kosovo police forces. Predictably, Russia followed the event by mocking KFOR and calling on the EU to inadequately mediate the ongoing tensions between the two states.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Dayton peace agreement that ended the war in 1995 is in crisis. The country continues to be driven by divisions between its Bosniak, Serb, and Croat communities, and Russia has used these divisions to its advantage. In March, Russia threatened retaliation if Bosnia joined NATO. Meanwhile, the Serb member of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Milorad Dodik, threatened that Republika Srpska, one of the two entities that make up the country, would secede from Bosnia. In December, the National Assembly of Republika Srpska voted in favor of starting a procedure for Bosnian Serbs to withdraw from state-level institutions, including the Bosnian army, security services, tax system, and judiciary. In addition to Republika Srpska, the Kremlin has supported Bosnian Croat nationalists in pushing for the creation of another entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina. The top international representative in Bosnia, Christian Schmidt, raised alarm bells in November when he said that "the prospects for further division and conflict are very real."

Putin's Ban

It is high time that Western powers woke up to the threat that Russian intervention in the Balkans poses to their interests. Here, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And they have several options at their disposal.

NATO should refocus on the region and prioritize de-escalation. It should deploy its Counter-Hybrid Support Team to the Balkans, as it did in Montenegro in 2019, to counter Russian disinformation campaigns and other information operations. NATO members should also organize a “coalition of the willing” to counter Russian interference in Bosnia, deploying peacekeeping missions in strategic areas, such as the northeastern district of Brcko, to prevent vulnerable areas from slipping out of control. This force could complement the EU-led peacekeeping force (EUFOR), which is tasked with maintaining peace and security in Bosnia – but whose mandate should be extended in the UN Security Council, where Russia and China have vetoes. In June, US President Joe Biden also signed an executive order to sanction those who threaten the stability of the Western Balkans; the EU should join these efforts.

Not all NATO members can be expected to support the Balkans, as Hungary and several other European NATO countries serve as Russia’s representatives in the organization. On the other hand, the United Kingdom seems to have understood the gravity of the crisis. It has pledged to maintain “stability in the Western Balkans” and warned Russia not to make a “strategic mistake” in the region. London must work to turn these words into action by leading a coalition of the willing to counter Russian interference in the region.

Above all, NATO should accelerate the accession of Bosnia and Kosovo to NATO. Such a move would increase the costs to the Kremlin of its operations in the Balkans. Russia has staunchly opposed NATO enlargement and now, as the crisis in Ukraine continues, has called for a legally binding guarantee that NATO will cease military activity in Eastern Europe. Integrating Bosnia and Kosovo would send the message that the Balkans will not be left to face Moscow and that Putin will not determine NATO’s future.

As it was at the start of the Yugoslav wars or on the eve of World War I, it may be difficult to convince the world of the importance of the Balkans. In the 1990s, European countries failed to respond with sufficient urgency to the crisis, and the United States was forced to intervene. This time, however, it is the United States that has turned inward and is unlikely to intervene. So the burden is likely to remain with the EU. Nothing less than the stability of Europe and the continued vitality of the EU and the NATO alliance are on the line.