Signals of power: Telekom Srbija and the geopolitics of influence in the Western Balkans

Headquarters of Telekom Srbija in Belgrade. Photo: Zarko Prusac / Shutterstock

Recent reporting on the planned launch of Newsmax Polska suggests that it may be part of a broader group expansion across Central and South-Eastern Europe. The company Telekom Srbija has been frequently identified as a distribution partner. At first glance, this may look like a routine commercial arrangement, the sort of market adjustment that accompanies a new broadcaster entering a crowded field. In the Western Balkans, however, it points to something more consequential: the steady consolidation of the position of “Telekom Srbija” within the region’s media and telecommunications infrastructure. The question is not simply who owns the content but who controls the systems through which audiences reach it. In a region where information markets remain fragile and political boundaries still shape commercial life, the power of distribution is never merely technical.

Telekom Srbija, a Serbian state-owned company and Vučić’s preferred tool to influence the information space in Serbia and the wider region, already operates the Euronews Serbia franchise. Euronews-branded operations have also expanded across Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. These arrangements are formally commercial. However, they carry political weight because they shape what reaches audiences, as well as on what terms and through which platforms. That matters in a region where regulators and media freedom monitors have repeatedly warned about concentration, weak safeguards and persistent political pressure. For example, Russian state-linked content, including the Serbian-language RT Balkan service launched in 2022, remains accessible through multiple distribution channels in the region. The point is not that every channel, franchise or platform arrangement is politically engineered in a direct sense. Instead, the cumulative effect of such arrangements means that it is possible is to create an information environment in which some narratives penetrate more easily than others.

It is tempting to treat Telekom Srbija as a domestic Serbian company. That would miss the more important development of the past decade: its gradual embedding across neighbouring markets. The Western Balkans has small, commercially fragile media systems that depend heavily on a limited number of distribution platforms. In such a setting, infrastructure rarely stays within national borders for long. Cable, broadband, mobile services, and media packages increasingly operate across state lines in practice, even when regulation remains national in form. This mismatch between regional commercial reality and fragmented oversight is one of the defining features of the current landscape.

The company’s expansion into cable, broadband and mobile networks across Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, together with its significant footprint through the company “m:tel” in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, places it at the centre of regional communications systems. Attempts to acquire operators in Albania and Kosovo were blocked by local authorities on national security grounds. This underlines the extent to which these systems are treated as strategic assets rather than ordinary commercial holdings. In societies where digital connectivity is inseparable from political and economic life, such investments are never merely peripheral. Instead, they shape access not only to entertainment and news but to business activity, administrative services, emergency communications and the broader digital economy. That makes them more than assets on a balance sheet. They are part of the operating system of public life.

The deeper issue is distribution. In the Western Balkans, audiences increasingly consume news and entertainment through bundled subscriptions, integrated services, and cross-platform packages. Whoever controls visibility, placement and pricing can influence public exposure almost as effectively as an editor shaping a front page. The result is not censorship in the conventional sense but a market structure that makes some voices easier to find, and easier to sustain, than others. This is a more modern and therefore more difficult problem than overt suppression as it works through friction rather than prohibition. A channel can remain legally available but become practically peripheral if it is hidden in a more expensive package, placed lower in the channel guide, or denied the reach of a preferred platform.

Concerns about the uneven availability of independent outlets such as N1 and Nova S have circulated for years in Serbian media reporting and civil society assessments. The broader problem is structural. When one company occupies a central position in both telecommunications and content distribution, it can create a market environment in which editorial independence formally exists but commercially viable pluralism steadily narrows. This narrowing does not require explicit instructions from above. Indeed, it can emerge from the everyday logic of platform control, commercial leverage, and the habits of audiences who rarely move beyond the first available bundle of services. Over time, that means the shape of debate is determined less by open censorship than by the architecture of choice itself.

Regulation has not kept pace with these changes. Across the Western Balkans, institutional capacity remains uneven and cross-border coordination is still limited. This leaves significant gaps between formal rules and actual market behaviour. The World Bank has noted the patchiness of the region’s telecommunications infrastructure and the need for regulatory harmonization, a reminder that infrastructure policy is not a technical detail but a strategic question. In such an environment, even small changes in ownership rules or distribution access can have outsized effects on the public sphere. This problem is compounded by the fact that telecommunications and media regulation are often handled separately, even though in practice they now operate as linked systems. If the market is integrated, but oversight is fragmented, then the burden of checking concentration falls through the cracks.

Telekom Srbija’s influence is reinforced by a wider portfolio of acquisitions across television, digital platforms, and sports broadcasting. In markets where advertising revenue is limited and concentrated, such moves place it in direct competition with independent broadcasters. The 2018 acquisition of the “Kopernikus” outlet remains emblematic. The sequence of transactions that followed, including the transfer of national television assets to individuals linked to the previous ownership structure, is widely cited as illustrative of a political economy in which media assets are entangled with financial and political networks rather than governed by straightforward market logic. This is important not because it proves a single commanding centre, but because it reveals the texture of the system: opaque, interdependent and responsive to political advantage.

The company’s most significant recent expansion has come through the acquisition of “NetTV Plus” and “Total TV”, alongside regional sports broadcasting rights across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and North Macedonia. The deal, reportedly valued at up to 1.5 billion euros, has substantially extended the group’s reach into direct-to-home broadcasting across the region and its global diaspora. Such platforms sit at the intersection of entertainment, identity and politics. In smaller markets, sports broadcasting often serves as a gateway into broader media ecosystems, shaping habits and loyalties. When control over those gateways becomes concentrated, the effect is not simply commercial. It ultimately reshapes the architecture through which audiences encounter political and cultural life. A household may subscribe for football or films and then absorb an entire media environment as part of the package.

“United Group” has retained ownership of key independent channels such as N1 and Nova S and has pledged to maintain their availability. Independent journalism persists in the area. Yet the terrain on which it competes has shifted in more subtle ways, affecting how easily audiences encounter alternative perspectives. Visibility is not the same thing as viability. A channel may remain on air, maintain editorial standards, and preserve a loyal audience while still facing a deteriorating market position if the broader distribution environment becomes less favourable. This is why media pluralism cannot be assessed solely by counting programmes. It must also account for the practical conditions under which those programmes reach the public.

There is also a wider geopolitical dimension to this story. The Western Balkans remains a contested information space in which external actors, domestic power structures, and commercial platforms interact in ways that are difficult to disentangle. Russian state-linked media continues to circulate in the region. Western-backed or European-branded outlets are also present across the region and often operate through mixed commercial and political arrangements. The region has become an arena in which influence is rarely exercised through a single decisive intervention. More often it emerges through persistent presence, layered ownership, platform dependence, and the gradual normalization of a particular communications order. That order is not predetermined, but it is not neutral either.

What is taking shape across the Western Balkans is neither a unified media system nor a collection of isolated national markets. It is a fragmented yet interconnected space in which infrastructure, content and political influence intersect across borders. In such conditions, changes in one country’s distribution architecture can reverberate quickly across the region. A shift in one market affects carriage terms in another, advertising assumptions in a third, and audience behaviour across the wider media landscape. The result is a region that is formally divided by state sovereignty but practically linked by shared platforms, shared content and shared vulnerabilities.

Influence is exercised not only through overt editorial control but through quieter mechanisms: pricing, bundling, platform design and visibility. These, over time, determine what audiences see and how often they see it. The result is not censorship but asymmetry. That asymmetry, rather than any single editorial line, poses the more enduring challenge to democratic resilience. It does not ban dissenting voices. Instead, it makes them harder to hear, harder to find and harder to sustain over time. In a political environment where trust is already low and institutions remain uneven, that kind of structural bias can matter as much as direct pressure.

For European policymakers, the lesson is uncomfortable but necessary. The challenge is not only to preserve media pluralism within individual states. It is to recognize that cross-border infrastructure actors can shape regional information space without appearing to do so overtly. In the Western Balkans, where commercial networks and political loyalties often overlap, the capacity to distribute content is itself a form of power. It should be treated as such. If European integration is to mean more than the formal alignment of laws and institutions, it must also mean a clearer understanding of how communication systems condition democratic life. That is where the quiet politics of the region are now being fought.

Dr Blerim Vela served as Chief of Staff to the President of Kosovo and as a member of Kosovo’s National Security Council. He holds a PhD in Contemporary European Studies from the University of Sussex and writes on governance, EU integration and security dynamics in South-Eastern Europe.

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Kosovo, media, media freedom, Serbia, Western Balkans