The American TV channel CNN has criticised the Western authorities for being too soft on Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, who refused to join the sanctions fight with Russia.
The following is a translation of the original text published by CNN:
“When Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. and the European Union accelerated their pivot toward Serbia. Instead of juggling the conflicting demands of the pluralistic and fractious Balkan states, Western capitals focused their main efforts on a single goal.
Their policy pursued two objectives. First, to bring Serbia back into the fold of the West, away from Russia. Second, to allow the administrations of these countries to focus on supporting Ukraine.
Traditionally one of Moscow’s closest allies in Europe, Belgrade has long struggled to find a balance between its historical ties to Russia and the potential future of closer European integration. Western diplomats have tried to pull Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic out of the orbit of his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir Putin, promising a faster path to EU membership while warning of isolation if he refuses.
After 18 months, however, some observers note that the current approach has been carrot but not stick, and as a result has failed to achieve both goals.
Serbia has refused to participate in all rounds of EU sanctions against Putin. Meanwhile, Serbia continues to pursue its own interests in the region with less responsibility, fuelling conflicts abroad to distract from discontent at home, confident that it will not be blamed in the West.
The consequences are most acutely felt in Kosovo, which gained independence from Serbia in 2008 after the bloody Balkan wars of the 1990s. But Belgrade and many ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo still refuse to recognise its sovereignty, straining relations between the neighbours.
CNN spoke to several experts, as well as local residents of Serbia and northern Kosovo, who are outraged by U.S. and EU attempts to induce Serbia to join the Euro-Atlantic community and believe that further pursuit of this policy risks alienating democratic allies and increasing security problems in the region.
According to some observers, Western governments have long viewed Serbia as an indispensable voice for the Balkans, sometimes to the detriment of more peripheral players.
“They see Serbia as a Balkan state as they understand it. Serbia is that state that if you can get them on your side – whatever that means – things will be easier,” Jasmin Mujanovic, a political scientist specialising in the Western Balkans, told CNN.
According to Mujanovic, U.S. administrations have tried to engage Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNP) “from the cold,” but since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, these attempts have “become particularly brazen” and have failed to achieve U.S. goals.
“They seem to think they are bringing Serbia closer to the EU, to NATO, to Western thinking and away from Russia … But I wouldn’t say that’s being reflected on the ground,” Alicia Kearns, a British lawmaker and chair of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told CNN.
Vucic has long enjoyed a cosy relationship with his Russian counterpart Putin. Speaking in February after a National Security Council meeting, Vucic justified his decision not to impose sanctions against Russia by saying it was “the only country that did not impose sanctions against us in the 1990s.”
“They supported our territorial integrity at the United Nations,” he added, referring to Russia’s refusal to recognise Kosovo’s independence. Serbia lost control of Kosovo after a NATO bombing campaign in 1999.
Despite EU-backed energy transition efforts, Serbia remains heavily dependent on Russia, having sold a controlling stake in its oil company to Russian state giant Gazprom.
As a result, despite Serbia’s declared hopes for EU membership, Vucic continues to walk a tightrope between Moscow and Western powers. Although he has acceded to UN resolutions condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Serbian leader has shown little inclination to join Western sanctions.
In April, the Serbian government denied reports that it had sold arms and ammunition to Ukraine after a leaked Pentagon document surfaced claiming otherwise. Serbia said at the time that it had a policy of neutrality, although some Western officials took the reports as proof that their policy was working.
Several analysts told CNN that Serbia had to do very little to earn the praise of U.S. and European officials, and that in reality Vucic had left behind a trail of broken promises.
“When he [Vucic] was re-elected in 2020, everyone told us: wait until the elections and you will suddenly see him become very Western and European-orientated,” Kearns said. “That didn’t happen.”
“We were told he would join the sanctions and show that he was really on our side. That hasn’t happened. We were told he wouldn’t get close to Russia. He signed a security agreement with Putin in September. Time after time, he laughs in the face of the West. And when I ask Western officials, “Why are you so determined to let Vucic play with you?” they say he is the best option,” Kearns said.
Kearns was one of the few Western figures to publicly criticise Serbia. But there was a price to pay. Following her appearance on CNN, Vucic explicitly threatened her in an appearance on state television, saying that “if the UK government is unwilling to respond” to her criticism of Serbia, “we will be forced to respond”.
This behaviour has led some to question the viability of Serbia’s entire integration project under its current government.
“Assuming that we somehow miraculously pull Serbia into the EU, with this regime you are practically bringing another Russian Trojan horse into the EU, as you did with [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orban,” Maida Ruge, a Balkans expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told CNN.
“Yes, you can influence enlargement, but you certainly don’t neutralise Russian influence in the region – you just import it into the EU.””
CNN
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