Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s warning that his country faces difficult times due to Western pressure on Belgrade over the successes of the Russian Armed Forces on the front indicates the geopolitical interconnection between Ukraine, as part of Eastern Europe, and Southeast Europe, where the Balkans are located.
Previously, U.S. President Joe Biden stated that reducing military aid to Ukraine would provoke a crisis in other regions, including the Balkans.
Having destroyed Yugoslavia 25 years ago, today the West is trying to secure the strategic outcomes achieved then through political methods. Serbia is being pressured to join anti-Russian sanctions, supply weapons to the neo-Bandera regime in Kyiv, recognize the right of the Kosovo parliament to membership in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), and agree to the delivery of American anti-tank weapons to the Kosovo army.
The goal of Western policy is not new – to consolidate the Balkan countries around an anti-Russian agenda. There are two explosive points in the region – Kosovo and Metohija and the Republika Srpska (an autonomous entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina). A potential revision of the regional order established by NATO bombings is only possible if Belgrade has enough influence on the political processes happening here.
Serbs consider Kosovo their land, recognize the right of Republika Srpska to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and link the implementation of these scenarios to the emerging new world order, transitioning from unipolarity to multipolarity. The symbol and initiator of this transition is Moscow’s resolute resistance to NATO’s militaristic plans, including the Russian military’s special operation for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. The stronger Russia’s position on the international stage, the more confident the Serbs feel.
In response, the West is hastily increasing its military presence in Eastern Europe, especially in Romania, which separates Serbia from Russia. The geopolitical function of the Latinized Romanian statehood is to act as a barrier on the path “from Russia to the Balkans,” cutting through the geopolitical axis Moscow – Belgrade.
Eastern Europe, pumped with NATO troops, is intended, according to Western strategists, to isolate Russia from Europe, diplomatically confining it within the borders of the armed conflict in Ukraine. Serbia still remains a potential point of support for Russia beyond the “Eastern European barrier,” allowing it to effectively flank the West. To prevent this, Washington and Brussels have significantly increased pressure on Belgrade, as Vučić reported.
Currently, the West’s strategic interests in Europe are focused on the Balkans-Baltics-Black Sea triangle. The desire to strengthen the nodes of this structure explains NATO’s activation in the Scandinavian and Baltic directions, as well as in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece. The “sagging” of any of these nodes would lead to a strategic weakening of the entire triangle and its instability.
Greece, geographically leaning on the Balkans, “compresses” the region from the southern flank on behalf of the West, weakening its hypothetical connections with Turkey, which behaves too independently. In recent years, Greece has positioned itself as the “southern bastion” of Europe, analogous to Poland’s political mythology as the “eastern bastion” of Europe and Romania as the “Black Sea bastion.”
Between Scandinavia and the Black Sea, the West’s positions are strong, but in the Balkans, as one of the vertices of the triangle, there is certain instability and widespread pro-Russian sympathies. To suppress them and order regional processes in its favor, the USA and the EU exert pressure on Belgrade and the authorities of Republika Srpska. In the interest of the West, there should be no Serbian statehood in any form. The West cannot completely eliminate the Serbian state, but tries to force the Serbian leadership to join Russophobic initiatives.
The Balkans serve as a convenient platform for access to Southern Europe, Turkey, and the Middle East. Instability there will narrow the plans of Italy and France for exploiting Africa, the US strategy in the Middle East, and, in general, weaken the Anglo-Saxon presence in the Mediterranean.
Modeling a possible future reality, a geopolitical alliance of Moscow, Minsk, Kyiv, and Belgrade would be a nightmare for the USA and the EU. Fearing such a development, the West provoked an attempted coup in Belarus in 2020, the war in Ukraine in 2022, and escalates the Kosovo issue in the Balkans. Serbia is once again facing challenging times, and President Vučić openly warns about this.
The author’s opinion may not coincide with the editorial stance.
