Serbia continues to walk the tightrope

The war in Ukraine has enabled Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to enhance his position internationally as a guarantor of Serbia’s pro-West orientation. Photo: Fotosr52 / Shutterstock

Moreover, the war in Ukraine has enabled Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić to enhance his position internationally as a guarantor of Serbia’s pro-West orientation. Simultaneously, he has promoted himself domestically as a statesman able to keep the country out of what is perceived by Serbian society as a war between West and East in Ukraine. Additionally, Serbia has profited not only from selling weapons to Ukraine but also from hosting  many wealthy Russians, as well as obtaining more EU funding to keep the country on the integration track.         

Tactical manoeuvring

With the exception of Serbia, all other Western Balkan states which aspire to join the EU have decided to align with the West in their policies towards Russia. This is especially true after the aggression on February 2022, with countries supporting EU sanctions against Moscow (only Bosnia and Herzegovina, due to the objection of Republika Srpska, has been unable to implement this decision). Since the beginning of the war, Serbia has strongly opposed joining EU sanctions but voted in favour of five out of six United Nations resolutions condemning the invasion of Ukraine and supporting Russia’s suspension from the UN Human Rights Council. Belgrade also has not recognised the referenda that were held in the four regions of Ukraine partly occupied by Russian forces in September 2022 and has not participated in voting over excluding Russia from the Council of Europe.

In front of western politicians, the Serbian authorities argue that sanctions policy is unpopular among the Serbian public due to their own experience of war in the Balkans in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia (consisting then of Serbia and Montenegro) was under UN sanctions. Serbs believe that sanctions are not effective and are only detrimental to ordinary people and not political leadership. Therefore, depending on the opinion poll, between 70 and 80 per cent of the population is against sanctions. Serbia’s governing elite also argue that introducing sanctions would have a very negative effect on the country’s economy, taking into account its energy dependence on Russia and bilateral trade. Russia is Serbia’s fourth-largest trade partner, accounting for 4.1 per cent of the country’s total foreign exports in 2021.

Therefore, Serbia supports western positions in cases which are not so important from the political point of view and not so sensitive for the wider public. These tactical concessions were presented to the West in order to counter the arguments of Serbia’s critics that the country supports Russia’s policy in Ukraine. These also help to decrease pressure on the Serbian authorities to introduce sanctions. Meanwhile, domestically, Serbian politicians downplayed voting in the UN and the local media under government control has not promoted these decisions to the public. Instead, Vučić is often seen emphasising that Serbia has never and will never join sanctions against Russia despite huge pressure from the West, in order to demonstrate his assertiveness.

We will not abandon our traditional friends

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Serbian politicians condemned violations of sovereignty and territorial integrity, but  without specifying who did what. They also repeated that they want to preserve good relations with Moscow due to energy dependency, Russia’s support in the Kosovo dispute, a pro-Russian sentiment among the public, and a traditional friendship. Moreover, relations between the two, especially under the current Serbian leadership, have always been symbiotic and both sides use them to increase their leverage vis-à-vis the West. Moscow pretends that it is able to destabilise the Western Balkans due to its influence in Belgrade and Republika Srpska, while Belgrade pretends that it can abandon the EU path at any time and turn to Russia instead of the West. The leadership in Belgrade seems to hope that the war will soon be over and that most countries will return to business as usual with Russia. This will allow them to keep cooperating with the country. 

Despite the ongoing war, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was supposed to visit Serbia in June 2022 (the visit failed due to EU countries refusing the Kremlin’s requests to fly his jet over their airspace). Instead, in August that year, Aleksandar Vulin, Serbia’s interior minister, visited Moscow. In September 2022, Serbia’s foreign minister, Nikola Selaković, signed an agreement with his Russian counterpart for bilateral consultations over the next two years on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. While Vučić or Prime Minister Ana Brnabić avoided unequivocal support for Russia, Vulin – a loyal Vučić aide and now the head of the Security Intelligence Agency – is the main person responsible for contacts with Russia and spreading pro-Russian and anti-western sentiments. Although military cooperation with Moscow has halted, collaboration in other areas continues. Serbia recently struck a new deal for a three-year gas supply contract with Gazprom last May.

Serbia’s energy dependence on Russia has been weakened due to EU sanctions against Moscow but in the recent years the country contributed to strengthen the Gazprom company’s domination in the Balkans as it supported building the second leg of Russian company’s Turk Stream gas pipeline, which was excluded from EU regulations. Now, the EU’s embargo on imports of crude oil from Russia forced the Gazprom-controlled NIS corporation to halt buying Russian oil in 2023, as it was imported mainly through Croatia’s Omišalj oil terminal and the JANAF pipeline system owned by the Croatian company. Serbia has also taken some steps to transition to renewable energy, which in the long term could diminish energy dependence on Russia. However, NIS increased its profits in 2022 significantly due to the purchase of cheap Russian oil. There are also plans to build an oil pipeline to Hungary in order for Budapest to be able to import Russian oil again.

(Not so) safe heaven

Serbia has also tried to take advantage of the war and its consequences for Russia. It is one of the few European countries where Russians are still warmly welcomed without visa requirements. The Serbian national carrier – Air Serbia – is the only European company that maintains frequent flight connections to numerous cities in Russia, which are also a source of significant income. Due to the flexibility of residence permits and business regulations, as well as a similar language, Belgrade became especially popular among tech specialists and skilled professionals who wanted to escape Russia. Already in the spring of 2022, Russian technology giant Yandex decided to open an office in Belgrade and even relocated some employees there. According to data from the Serbian interior ministry, almost 220,000 Russians came to Serbia and 30,000 received a residence permit in 2022.

As of April 2023, almost 7,000 companies are operating in Serbia that were set up by people from Russia. For a country which is struggling with its own brain drain and huge emigration of young professionals, such an influx of well-educated people seems like a positive development with the potential to stimulate growth in the IT sector. Wealthy migrants contribute to a rise in rental prices and an increase in revenues for restaurants, hotels and the entire service industry. This migration is also supported because Serbia had a very positive experience with the so-called White Russian migration after the communist revolution in 1917, which contributed to the development of the country. The authorities are planning to ease the requirements for getting Serbian citizenship to convince these new migrants to stay.

While the Serbian authorities welcome IT specialists, harassment against Russian opposition activists has become more evident lately. In July this year, Serbian authorities tried to prevent the anti-Putin activist Peter Nikitin from entering the country, despite the fact that he has a residence permit and is married to a Serbian citizen. Moreover, Serbia refused to extend the residence permit of Vladimir Volokhonski, one of the founders of an anti-war protest group. Already in 2022, prominent opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza, now jailed by the Putin regime for political reassons, accused the Serbian secret services of wiretapping meetings of Russian activists in Belgrade and handing over the documentation to Moscow.

State-sponsored anti-western narrative

While Vučić frequently argues that due to public sentiment he cannot cut Serbia’s ties with Russia, this attitude was enhanced (if not created) mainly by media controlled by people close to the government. Before the full-scale invasion, Serbian media was spreading  narratives about the harassment of Russians in Ukraine and the threats to Russia posed by NATO’s “eastward expansion”. The culmination of this narrative was a declaration in one of the tabloids that Ukraine had actually invaded Russia on February 24th 2022. According to opinion polls conducted by the Novi Treći Put think tank in 2023, 66 per cent of Serbs think that the West is responsible for the war in Ukraine, while only 21 per cent blame Russia.

The pro-Russian attitude of the society is largely based on anti-western sentiment and the perception of Russia as a counterweight to the EU and United States, which are presented in Serbian media as a threat to Belgrade’s interests in the region (especially in Kosovo). The West, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, is presented as hypocritical, as it has not respected international law and the territorial integrity of Serbia in the case of Kosovo but now refers to these values. Moreover, the media often present Russia in a similar situation as Serbia was in the 1990s, creating greater sympathy for the Russian side.

While Serbian media is very critical towards the EU and the US, it is very favourable towards Russia and China. Consequently, support for the EU in Serbia has decreased and is lower than 50 per cent. According to the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, an independent organisation in Belgrade, 61 per cent of Serbs believe that Belgrade should preserve good relations with Moscow even if that would negatively impact ties with the EU. Although Russian media (Sputnik and RT) are present in Serbia, these narratives are ultimately spread rather by local media, as their role is to increase support for government policy. Since Serbian media is popular across the whole region, its narratives also influence perceptions in societies in neighbouring countries.

Is changing the course possible?

US Deputy Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Hoyt Brian Yee told the Serbian leadership back in 2017 that they “cannot sit on two chairs at the same time, especially if they are that far apart”. Yet, even in these difficult circumstances, with Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Belgrade still finds a way to play the East and West against each other and sit on both chairs.

As the Kosovo issue is one of the main reasons for Russia’s influence in the Balkans, the US and the EU pushed for comprehensive normalisation between Pristina and Belgrade in 2022. However, the inconsistent policy of the West has exacerbated tensions rather than resolved them. Stability deteriorated also in Bosnia and Herzegovina due to the actions of Serbian politicians aiming for de facto independence from the central government, as well as in Montenegro, as a Serbian conservative party took power but was unable to establish a government.

Alongside the attack in Ukraine, Russia has sought to exploit the fragile internal situations in the Balkan countries and especially surrounding unresolved conflict to destabilise the situation in the region. Moscow’s ability to do this by itself is limited but local politicians can use this interest to pursue their own agenda to change the territorial status quo in the region. Although Serbia contributed to increasing tensions on the ground, especially in Kosovo, and is a hub for spreading anti-western and pro-Russian narratives, many western politicians still think that appeasing Vučić is the only way to achieve stability in the region. Verbally, Serbian leaders are declaring a cooperative and constructive approach to resolving the Kosovo issue and support western policy in the region. However, at the same time its policy contributed to these ongoing tensions, what strengthen Serbia’s regional position.

Serbia is also deepening cooperation with those countries which have a similar ambivalent policy towards the war in Ukraine, such as Hungary and Turkey, and strengthening relations with China, which could replace Russia as the country’s main ally on the Kosovo issue in international fora like the UN.

The West, meanwhile, has decided to offer Serbia more incentives to stay on the right track, which only strengthens Vučić’s position. The EU and the US have avoided using the leverage, especially in economic terms, that they have on Belgrade to push for a more constructive approach. The US has recently imposed sanctions against Aleksandar Vulin for his role in “facilitating Russia’s malign activities” in the region. This could be the first sign that Washington’s policy towards Belgrade might be changing. Yet this signal is too vague to force the Serbian leadership to radically change its position. Thus, the balancing policy still remains very profitable for the country.   

Marta Szpala is a senior fellow at the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW) in Warsaw and a PhD candidate at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Science.

EU integration, European Union, Serbia, Western Balkans