Russian narrative in Serbian media, nourishes territorial ambitions for Kosovo, and speaks against NATO and West

The United States and NATO were somewhat relieved this week when the Serbian government announced it would withdraw its troops after ordering a rapid military buildup along the border with Kosovo. The U.S. had called it “a very destabilizing development” – and news of the apparent de-escalation was “welcome,” the U.S. State Department said.

But according to officials and experts in Kosovo who spoke to The Daily Beast, only a symptom of the problem has disappeared. Beneath the surface, tensions between Serbia and Kosovo threaten to grow even higher, with Russia stoking them behind the scenes through a wide-ranging and entrenched operation of influence in Serbia.

“Russian propaganda is widespread in Serbia, spreading lies and pro-Kremlin lines about territorial ambitions, violence, the war in Ukraine, NATO, and the West.” “Russia’s extensive disinformation and propaganda operation is aimed at inciting violence and is intended, among other things, to support Serbia’s efforts to control Kosovo,” Kosovo Ambassador to the United States Ilir Dugolli said in an interview with the Daily Beast.

“We have seen various attempts by Russia … and we have highlighted them, of course, in Serbia, to incite violence, to create this … “terrible situation of the Serbs in the northern parts” of Kosovo in particular and also present in other areas … to trigger violent attacks and general instability,” Dugolli told The Daily Beast.

Serbia and Russia, along with a small number of other countries, have not recognized Kosovo’s independence. Serbia’s president has vowed never to recognize Kosovo’s independence, and Russia has long harbored concerns about Kosovo, stressing for years that it will categorically deny Kosovo’s independence.

In recent days, these long-standing tensions have turned to violence.

The alarm comes after the terrorist attack in Banjska, in which a Kosovo police officer and some of the terrorists were killed after an exchange of gunfire.

Kosovo accused Serbia of being behind the attack and claimed Serbia was trying to destabilize Kosovo.

Serbia boasts few ties to the West – it was identified as a candidate for the European Union in 2012. But Russia’s strong influence, combined with its control over Serbia’s media and information environment, helps spread narratives that further reinforce pro-Russia and anti-Western sentiments that keep Belgrade within Russia’s sphere of influence.

Many media companies in Serbia are owned by oligarchs with ties to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. In 2015, Russia established a hub for the Russian state news agency Sputnik. Currently, Russia is deepening its disinformation channels in Serbia: The state-funded Russian television channel RT said last year that it would create a local-language version in Serbia, to be run by the Sputnik editor’s daughter.

Russian narratives that have gripped Serbia in recent years include anti-Western and anti-NATO narratives aimed at reinforcing Serbian public opinion that Kosovo is not independent.

In Serbia, the emphasis is on reminding Serbs of the NATO bombing campaign and blaming the West for essentially pulling Kosovo out of Serbia, said Ruslan Stefanov, co-director and co-author of Kremlin Playbook, a joint project of the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“In the case of Serbia, the No. 1 narrative is, of course, “Don’t forget NATO … It helped Kosovo secede.” It’s part of your country,” Stefanov told The Daily Beast. ” This is part of a wider campaign against NATO.”

In recent months, some of the most popular narratives in the country’s Russian and Serbian media have concerned Kosovo, said Goran Georgiev, an analyst at CSD.

“The Kosovo issue is the main topic for Sputnik and RT, and also for local media, most of which are pro-Russian,” Georgiev told The Daily Beast.

According to data from Similarweb CSD provided to The Daily Beast, Kurir.rs – with 60.7 million visits in August – are the most popular websites in Serbia in terms of traffic, followed by Blic.rs, Novosti.rs, sd.rs and RTS. rs, many of which disseminate pro-Russian lines. According to data from CrowdTangle, Sputnik and RT generated the most interactions on Facebook over the past 30 days.

According to a monitoring report by CRTA, the Center for Research, Transparency, and Accountability, the Serbian media space is full of misrepresentations of facts and propaganda, with Alo and Kurir.rs accounting for more than half of the news outlets spreading disinformation. According to the analysis, “Večernje Novosti” and “Informer”, the two daily newspapers, are the second most serious offenders.

Sputnik on the main page of Serbia in recent days was a brazen news about Kosovo. A headline complained that “The actions of the West have never been so morbid: They do not know that the day of mourning for the Serbs will last until freedom arrives in Kosovo,” Reflecting a long-held belief in Serbia that Kosovo is under some kind of “occupation.”

The article said that the deadly attack in Kosovo represents a hatred in Kosovo for the lives of Serbs. “Evil reigns in Kosovo,” the article says.

The main Kurir.rs page this week also expressed Serbia’s territorial ambitions in Kosovo. On Wednesday, a post focused on Kosovo’s denial of independence while expressing optimism about Serbia’s efforts to cooperate with Russia and China in Kosovo and in “defending” Serbian territory.

More broadly, narratives about territorial ambitions in Serbia closely align with Russian views on violence and war. In the case of the Russian war in Ukraine, Russian and Serbian media have focused on spreading false information about the war in Ukraine. According to Vox Ukraine and the Center for International Crisis and Conflict Studies (CECRI), headlines such as “Ukraine has started a war against Russia” and “Ukrainian troops bombed a maternity home” appeared in Serbia shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. /TheGeopost/