Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Monday violently attacked the Wagner Group, an organization accused of trying to recruit Serbs to fight in Ukraine. A rare anti-Russian foray into a country described as one of the most propitious for Vladimir Putin in Europe. Explanations.
Enough is enough. “Why are you, members of the Wagner group, calling Serbs? [pour combattre en Ukraine, NDLR] when you know it’s illegal?” Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic on Monday, April 16
Blood Strike is rare. “Serbia is one of Russia’s best friends outside the former Soviet sphere, and Aleksandar Vucic has good relations with Moscow,” said Dimitar Bechev, a specialist in Balkan geopolitics at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies.
Wagner and the “people’s patrol”
But this time the very populist Aleksandar Vucic failed to digest a sequence that had just been broadcast on the pro-Russian channel RT Balkan. A video there showed soldiers portrayed as Serbs fighting alongside the Russians in Ukraine. “That was clever of them. They disguised a job advertisement – which would have been illegal in Serbia – as a report containing all the necessary information to join Wagner in Ukraine,” explains Vuk Vuksanovic, a specialist in Russia-Serbia relations at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy. In fact, a law forbids Serbs from engaging in conflicts abroad.
A barely hidden advertisement recently added to other indices of the presence of Russian mercenaries in Serbia. Wagner’s opening of an office in Belgrade first fueled rumors in December. “There was talk of establishing a letterbox company, which in reality would have served this group to establish itself more firmly in Serbia. But nothing could ever be proven,” explains Vuk Vuksanovic.
In early January, the emblematic skull and crossbones representing the Wagner Group’s coat of arms appeared on a mural in central Belgrade. This drawing was claimed by the far-right People’s Patrol movement, suggesting that this small group represents Russian mercenaries in Serbia.
No wonder. Shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine in March 2022, the “People’s Patrol” took part in organizing a demonstration in support of Russia. “Some of its members were also invited to St. Petersburg to the building occupied by Wagner,” emphasizes Vuk Vuksanovic.
The efforts of the men of Prigojine and his squadrons in Serbia do not seem to have awakened hundreds of warrior vocations at the moment. “The number of Serbian mercenaries fighting for Russia in Ukraine seems very small,” said Othon Anastasakis, director of the Center for Studies in Southeast Europe at Oxford University.
Serbs still pro-Russian?
But for Aleksandar Vucic the problem lies elsewhere. At a time when relations between Europe and Russia are at their lowest and Belgrade is trying to appear more favorable to the European Union – the question of its membership in the European bloc has been dormant since 2013 – Serbia has no desire to present itself as a haven of peace for Wagner and recruit reservoir for Moscow.
“Aleksandar Vucic is upset by these Russian recruitment efforts because Wagner is making him and his country a target for Washington and Brussels,” notes Vuk Vuksanovic. Therefore, in an attempt to reassure the western camp, in an interview granted to the American chain Bloomberg on Wednesday, January 18, he reiterated that “Crimea and Donbass are Ukrainian”.
However, it was no coincidence that Moscow chose Serbia to find recruits. Belgrade has always managed to maintain good relations with Russia. The country has therefore repeatedly refused to support international sanctions against Russia. “It is also the only country on the continent that is still served by flights from Moscow,” says Othon Anastasakis.
Aleksandar Vucic also negotiated a very beneficial Russian gas supply deal for Serbia in late May 2022…although the rest of Europe was keen to reduce its reliance on Russian hydrocarbons as quickly as possible.
Russia in particular enjoys great popularity in public opinion and the war hasn’t changed that much. “In the eyes of the Serbs, Russia has a huge advantage: it’s not the United States,” Vuk Vuksanovic summarizes. Public opinion has “a very bitter memory of the NATO bombing of Serbia during the Yugoslav war in the 1990s, and Russian soldiers also fought alongside the Serbs,” Othon Anastasakis lists.
Some Serbs have also not forgiven Washington and Europe for recognizing Kosovo’s independence, which Serbia has contested, in 2008. The status of Kosovo is also one of Moscow’s most important levers of influence over Belgrade. Russia is Serbia’s strongest UN Security Council ally in the Kosovo talks.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t move the lines in Serbia much. This war is mainly “perceived as a Russian attempt to shake the international order, which is dominated by a single country: the United States,” explains Vuk Vuksanovic.
Aleksandar Vucic caught in his own trap
The Serbian President is no stranger to this very pro-Russian vision of the conflict in Ukraine. He created a media landscape that gave a lot of space to Russian propaganda. By sometimes adopting a pro-European stance internationally, he can play the role of the only bulwark in Brussels against overly pro-Russian sentiments that would take root in his country, Vuk Vuksanovic analyses.
In doing so, he contributed “to Putin becoming a superstar in the eyes of a section of the population,” estimates the expert from the Belgrade Center for Security Policy. A strategy that only seemed to have advantages as long as Aleksandar Vucic could play on both the European and Russian tables.
But with the war in Ukraine, this position is becoming increasingly untenable. “Washington and Brussels hope to be able to use this conflict to draw Serbia more into the western camp,” says Othon Anastasakis. This would make economic sense as the EU is Serbia’s largest trading partner.
Aside from the fact that Aleksandar Vucic can hardly be too critical of Vladimir Putin, under threat of rejection by public opinion, he has helped become a “Putinophile”. “He built his own political trap,” says Vuk Vuksanovic.
And that is probably another reason why the Serbian President was angry about Wagner’s mercenaries. “He has no wish for this group to establish a larger presence in Serbia,” explains Vuk Vuksanovic. For this expert, he has seen the political weight that the group can have in certain African countries, where it is accused of influencing them too wish to have the same sword of Damocles hanging over his head that would sign the death warrant of his policy of compromise between Brussels and Moscow.
