
Dr Boris Varga, Columnist from Serbia for the The Geopost
At the beginning of the year, the US imposed sanctions on the Russian majority-owned energy company Naftna industrija Srbije (NIS), giving Belgrade until the end of February 2025 to completely divest Russian capital from NIS. This move cuts the Russian octopus in the Western Balkans off from a key branch of economic and political influence.
The past year has been crucial for reducing Russian influence in Serbia and the region. In April, Belgrade turned to the West for arms purchases from Russia with a deal to buy French Rafale fighter jets.
It is also known that the Serbian military industry supplies millions of munitions to Ukraine via third countries, destroying more than a thousand Russian assault troops and aggressor equipment per day. Earlier, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic supported Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s peace formula.
Since last year, Serbia has started buying gas from Azerbaijan and, at the request of the West, has dispelled its total dependence on Russia.
Although he was publicly invited by Putin, Vucic did not appear at the BRICS summit in Kazan last October, thus demonstrating his economic distance from Russia and the countries of the global south.
Russia is again losing influence in Serbia and the region, most recently in 1948 when Yugoslavia turned its back on the imperial policy of the USSR.
However, it is not to be deluded that Aleksandar Vucic and his Russophile ruling Serbian Progressive Party have repeated Tito’s historic ‘no’ to the policies of the new Stalin-Putin. Vucic’s ‘no’ to Russia is completely against his will and solely under pressure from the West.
Serbia has not yet imposed sanctions against the Russian Federation, and since December, Russia Today TV (RT Balkan) has started broadcasting 24/7 propaganda and disinformation programmes in Serbian.
The explosion in Kosovo, which damaged the Ibar-Lepenc canal, suggests that even a year and a half after the Serbian-backed terrorist attack in Banjska, the security threat posed by organised crime and secret services linked to Moscow has not disappeared.
Aleksandar Vucic and his authoritarian government are repeating the Russian propaganda narrative that a ‘colour revolution’ is under way in Serbia. The Serbian President is under pressure from months of student protests and is threatening demonstrators with violence and pro-Russian political paramilitary groups called “loyalists”.
With the gradual cutting of the sleeves of the Russian octopus in the Western Balkans, the phrase ‘Serbian world’, which was coined on the basis of the ‘Russian world’, is disappearing from public media discourse.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the Republika Srpska, the most vocal pro-Russian separatist in the Balkans, Milorad Dodik, and his entourage, are under sanctions. Dodik said last August that he never had a plan to secede.
After Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the West will have to expel Russia from the Balkans in the new cold war in Europe, whose harmful influence it had previously tolerated.
Can the “Serbian world”, which emerged as a dream of pro-Russian revanchists from the wars of the 1990s, disappear overnight? Unlikely, it will be there even without Russia.
Of course, it is good that the direct Belgrade-Moscow flight, on which members of Slobodan Milosevic’s family fled to everyone’s delight after the revolution that overthrew him, has not yet been cancelled. It can now also serve the authority of Aleksandar Vucic.