Pendarovski in Davos: Western Balkans are most endangered by Kremlin

He has cited the northern Kosovo case and Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

According to him, the Kremlin through propaganda and especially false news attempts to create tensions in the region.

“A short description. We have two hot or fragile spots from time to time in the Western Balkan region. It is Republika Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Kosovo north. What Putin's regime is doing many years ago, not only since the war began in Ukraine, is the attempt to provoke people there to violate the integrity of these two countries. In fact, during the last year Russian propaganda, false news, political propaganda, hybrid threats and such attacks have not intensified because Putin's regime is completely preoccupied with attacking the Western Alliance because of the war in Ukraine. But local actors who are not very happy with the so-called peace agreements that have been reached in the 1990s are doing the job and occasionally provoke inflammatory rhetoric, causing riots in these two countries. The assumption and judgment is that if Russia is to distract the attention of the West from Ukraine (which is the main theatre of war and propaganda), then the Western Balkans is more important than the Baltic countries. So we have to take care of this as the Western alliance as NATO's alliance and as members of the EU or candidate countries for membership, because it seems to me that at the so-called soft points of pan-European security architecture now, besides Ukraine, the Western Balkans are naturally the most endangered by the Kremlin”.