Danger to national security: Leaders of the National Patrols from Serbia, who are connected to the Russian organization Wagner, are banned from entering BiH

The BiH security services (OSA and the BiH Foreign Service) have banned six Serbian citizens with links to the Russian paramilitary group Wagner from entering BiH, Istraga.ba has learnt.

Damnjan Knežević, the leader of the Serbian association Narodna patrola, members of this association Zoran Lekic and Aleksandar Lisov, members of the Wagner paramilitary formation Aleksandar Milovanovic and Zoran Pavic from Valjevo, and Dragan Mirkovic from Sabac have been banned from entering Bosnia and Herzegovina.

All of them have been declared as persons endangering national security and have been banned from entering Bosnia and Herzegovina since the beginning of this year.

Milovanovic, Pavic and Mirkovic are currently in Ukraine, fighting on the side of Russian forces. Damnjan Knezevic, Zoran Lekic and Aleksandar Lisov have been very active in the north of Kosovo and recently visited the Wagner Centre in Russia.

The People’s Patrols are a right-wing organisation that has been waging an anti-immigrant campaign in Serbia in recent years. As the BBC reports in Serbian, the organiser of the patrols is the initiative of the organisation No Surrender of Kosovo, led by Damnjan Knezevic, founder and former vice-president of the Serbian Sabor Zavetnici.

He left the then movement, and today’s party, at the end of 2014, after being dismissed from his position as Vice-President. He continued his involvement after leaving Zavetnici, as a speaker and organiser of rallies against the NATO pact, as well as the Vidovdan protest in 2018, where a petition was signed to ban foreign-funded political NGOs.

In July 2019, together with other right-wingers, he invaded the play “Srebrenica – when we who are killed rise up” in Kolarč’s endowment. Last November, Damnjan Knežević stayed at the Wagner Center in Russia.

“It is an honour to be here”, says Knezevic in a video released on 29 November on the occasion of his visit to the Wagner Centre.

The Wagner Centre video also features Zoran Lekic and Aleksandar Lisov, who was introduced in early December as the ideologist and head of the PMC Wagner Centre – ANO – Russian-Serbian Cultural and Information Center of Friendship and Cooperation Orly in Belgrade.

Less than a month after his visit to the Wagner Centre, Damnjan Knezevic called on Serbs to start liberating Jarinje in northern Kosovo. On 18 December last year, Knezevic was in Jarinje with several masked members of right-wing associations from Serbia.

In contrast, Aleksandar Milovanovic, Zoran Pavic and Dragan Mirkovic were more concrete in their pro-Russian activities. The three have been fighting in Ukraine for years as members of the Wagner paramilitary formation from Russia.

The list of Wagner members published by the Ukrainian security services includes Aleksandar Milovanovic, Dragan Mirkovic and Zoran Pavic./Istraga.ba/