The President of Northern Macedonia, Stevo Pendarovski, spoke about the danger Russia poses to the Western Balkans during his speech at a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Pendarovski mentioned the case of northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina. According to him, the Kremlin is trying to create tensions in the region through propaganda and especially fake news.
“A brief description. We have two hot spots or fragile points from time to time in the Western Balkan region. It is Republika Srpska inside Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the north of the Republic of Kosovo. What the Putin regime has been doing many years ago, not just since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, is trying to provoke the people there to violate the integrity of these two countries. To be realistic, Russian propaganda, fake news, political propaganda, hybrid threats, and such attacks have not intensified in the last year because the Putin regime is completely busy attacking the Western alliance because of the war in Ukraine”, says Pendarovski.
President of North #Macedonia 🇲🇰 @SPendarovski giving a state of play of Russian influence in the Western Balkans at @Davos:
– "The Western Balkans is more prone to Russian deflections from #Ukraine 🇺🇦 than the Baltics"
– "The U.S. is the key player here." pic.twitter.com/8yxupeSmZQ— Rainier Jaarsma (@RJaarsma) January 17, 2023
“Local actors who are not very satisfied with the so-called peace agreements that were reached in the 1990s are doing this work and provoking from time to time with inflammatory rhetoric that is causing unrest in these two countries. My assumption and judgment is that if Russia will divert the attention of the West from Ukraine (which is the main place of war and propaganda), the Western Balkans is much more than the Baltic countries. So, as a Western alliance, as a NATO alliance and as EU members or candidates for accession, we have to pay attention to that, because it seems to me that in the so-called weak points of the pan-European security architecture now, except for Ukraine of course, the Western Balkans is the most endangered by the Kremlin”, he concluded.
Asked where the decisive actor in this situation was the EU, NATO or the U.S., Pendarovski replied briefly, “The United States.” /Gazeta Express/
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