Convicted Donbas fighter on barricades in northern Kosovo

A few days after local Serbs blocked roads in northern Kosovo, a Serbian citizen convicted of taking part in the 2015 war on the Russian side in Ukraine visited the barricades.

Nikola Jovic, who was convicted by a higher court of participating in the war in Ukraine, which is a criminal offence under Serbian law, posted photos on his Facebook profile from the village of Veliko Rudare in the municipality of Zvečan in northern Kosovo.

For days, local Serbs have been blocking the road with trucks, expressing their frustration over the arrest of their compatriot and former Kosovo police officer Dejan Pantić.

Pantić was arrested on 10 December and is suspected by the Kosovo authorities of involvement in the attack on the premises of the Central Election Commission of Kosovo.

The photographs taken on 13 December of Jovic, who, according to him, went to the north of Kosovo as a journalist for the Russian state-owned media Russia Today (RT), also show a KFOR vehicle, a Serbian flag on the fence of one of the houses, as well as a tent set up by the locals in the village of Veliko Rudare.

Jović also posted a photo of himself in North Mitrovica, Kosovo.

“On the barricades. Always with my people,” Jović wrote alongside the photos.

In one of Jović’s photos, the symbol of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine, the “Z”, is seen.

He also posted on Facebook how he was reporting from Kosovo as a correspondent for the Russian state-owned channel Russia Today.

On 15 November, RT started broadcasting online, i.e. web content of its Serbian-language programme with the message “Kosovo is Serbia”.

As a Kremlin-controlled and state-financed media outlet, RT is banned from broadcasting in the European Union from March 2022.

It has been identified as key to the spread of Russian propaganda and is the target of a broad package of sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

In October, Jovic posted on Facebook that he had been banned from entering Bosnia and Herzegovina. Whether Jović was allowed to enter Kosovo, the RSE did not receive a reply from the Kosovo police.

Radio Free Europe (RSE) attempted to obtain information from Jović about his stay in Kosovo, but he refused to answer questions.

In a written reply on Facebook, he cited his dissatisfaction with RSE’s previous writing about him as the reason.

“Support for Serbs” and reporting from the north of Kosovo

On 13 December, Jovic wrote on Facebook that he understood that it was important “to be there with our brothers” with the symbol of the Serbian flag, as well as that ihe will be “for a few more days” in Kosovo.

In another post on 11 December, Jović announced his reporting on the Russian state channel RT, in which he speaks in English about the situation in Kosovo.

In his report for RT, he describes what is happening in northern Kosovo as a “provocation” by the Albanians and Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti, who, he says, is “trying to impose his will” on the Serbs in Kosovo.

In a Facebook post, he wrote that he was “using his position as RT’s international correspondent” to inform “the world public about the situation in our southern province and the ongoing terror against Serbs” in Kosovo.

Kosovo declared independence in 2008, which is not recognised by official Belgrade. Serbia, with the help of Russia, is blocking Kosovo’s membership of international institutions, among other things.

The official Kremlin’s policy of the latest escalation is blamed by the European Union, as Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated, on “a major failure of mediation in the stalled dialogue”.

Since 2011, the EU has been mediating in the negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, regularly bringing together representatives of both countries in attempts to normalise relations and finally achieve mutual recognition.

Spreading propaganda

Predrag Petrovic, director of research at the non-governmental Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCBP), told Radio Free Europe that Jovic’s presence at the barricades does not in itself pose a security risk, but stressed:

“What may pose a security challenge is how this news will be passed on, especially among pro-Russian and far-right channels. The very fact that he was there can be used for propaganda purposes on these channels”, says Petrovic.

Asked how much capacity the Serbian state has to deal with returnees from foreign battlefields, Petrović says that the relevant institutions have so far shown no interest in resocialising these people.

“And the people who went to Syria to fight against the regime of Bashar al-Assad (President of Syria) were left to themselves, that is, to the local community to resocialise them. It is the same with those who went to the Ukrainian battlefield,” says Petrovic.

A convicted journalist

As RSE previously reported, in September 2022, Jović posted on Facebook that he had travelled to the Donetsk and Lugansk (Donbas) regions in eastern Ukraine, posting photos of himself with several uniformed soldiers.

He then stated that he was travelling as a journalist.

In September, Jović was presented in the same capacity at a forum at the Russian House, the Russian Centre for Science and Culture in Belgrade, where he spoke about Ukraine.

But Jović had not previously gone to Ukraine as a journalist, but as a participant in the war.

RSE has obtained a ruling of the Belgrade High Court which states, among other things, that Jović joined the paramilitary formation of the “7th Brigade” of the “Donetsk People’s Republic” in eastern Ukraine in March 2015.

This is a pro-Russian formation that sides with the separatists.

The verdict states that Jovic was armed with an automatic rifle and left Ukraine in April of that year. Jović pleaded guilty in court.

Before this court, he was sentenced to a suspended sentence of one year in prison because it is a criminal offence to participate in a war on a foreign battlefield in Serbia.

In parts of eastern Ukraine, Donetsk and Lugansk, Moscow instigated a separatist uprising in 2014, and these parts of Ukraine have been the scene of fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists ever since.

Jovic previously told RSE that being a fighter in the war in Ukraine is not an obstacle to his work as a journalist.

“Having been in Donbass several times in these seven years, both as a volunteer and as a journalist, I can look at the topic and the issue from several sides and angles,” he wrote, among other things, in a reply to RSE in September. .

According to estimates by the Embassy of Ukraine in Serbia in December 2018, more than 300 citizens have left Serbia to fight on the pro-Russian side.

32 convictions have been handed down in Serbia for participation in the war in Ukraine between 2015 and 2018. In 28 cases, the court sentenced the defendants to suspended prison sentences and four persons to six months’ house arrest.

Right-wing organisations support Serbs in Kosovo

On 11 December, Jović posted on Facebook an invitation to a right-wing protest organised on 12 December in front of the Church of St Sava in Belgrade in support of Serbs in Kosovo.

The organisers of this rally were masked and did not want to reveal their identities.

A video of the protest was shared on Telegram by the Russian paramilitary group “Wagner”, which has been placed on the sanctions list by the European Union (EU). According to media reports, this unit is made up of trained mercenaries ready to take part in wars all over the world.

Western governments accuse Moscow of using the Wagner Group as a paramilitary force in conflicts in Ukraine, Libya, Syria, Sudan, Mozambique and the Central African Republic.

The unit has also played an active role on the Russian side since the invasion of Ukraine.

On its Telegram channel, it is also closely monitoring the crisis in northern Kosovo, where trucks and buses are blocking roads and blocking traffic to the Jarinje and Brnjak border crossings with Serbia.

The immediate trigger is the arrest of former Serbian police officer Dejan Pantić, but tensions in Kosovo started earlier, when Serbian police, judges, prosecutors and administrative staff in the north of Kosovo left Kosovo’s institutions in early November.

On 15 December, the authorities in Serbia requested KFOR to return Serbian security forces to Kosovo on the basis of UN Resolution 1244.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Gabriel Escobar (Escobar) said in an interview with RSE on 13 December that he categorically rejected this request.

On 13 November, the NATO peacekeeping mission in Kosovo (KFOR) announced on its official Facebook page that the only way to a lasting peace is through dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade, respecting the rights of all communities./REL/