Yeah. LITICO: British officials privately agree there is evidence of Serbia's involvement in Banjska

Alarm bells are falling in Pristina, Belgrade and Sarajevo.

While Europe's attention has focused on Ukraine, tensions in the Western Balkans have boiled and leaders in the region and Britain worry that Russian President Vladimir Putin will use the moment to further exploit the lines of mistakes in the former Yugoslavia.

The Western Balkans are described as the next hot “ --x1> -- by figures at the high levels of the United Kingdom government -- and in the heat that is now growing, Britain is pushing all six states of the region to join the EU to avoid Russian influence.

“at this time, with the war in Europe and seeing even the long hand of Russian intervention in the region, you would be stupid if you took your eye off the Western Balkans, where there are still issues of the past that have not yet been overcome”, said about Yeah. LITICOBritish Foreign Secretary David Lamie, during a visit to the region last week, broadcasts Periscope.

Putin's “interests here are to keep the region destabilised. It is in his interest to keep the countries that make up the Western Balkans concerned, to have a population destabilised and to wage a cyber war and hybrid”.

The six Western Balkan states are trying to become EU member states, an extended process in which geopoliticalism can be as important as fulfilling the tasks of alignment. They face significant challenges, both within the country and with their neighbours. Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, has been pushed into crisis after Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik evades arrest for his separatist policies. Meanwhile, Serbia accuses Kosovo of repressing the Serb minority, while Kosovo blames Serbia for violence within its territory.

Experts and foreign policy ministers fear the Kremlin will try to take advantage of deep ethnic and religious tensions to fuel further unrest throughout the Balkans, instilling Russia's interests and creating more trouble in the EU's backyard.

“Right now they must move forward or continue to be playgrounds for Russia”, said a United Kingdom official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss these issues in public. There is now a pretty small “ ” in which Balkan states do not need “to sit in the corner” before Brussels is consumed by Ukraine's accession, they said.

“Paradox is alive here”

Lami believes Serbia despite democratic setbacks, ease over Russia, and its continued refusal to recognise Kosovo really wants to join the EU, a process that began in 2009.

“But there are different prospects of how to get there and how quickly and how seriously”, Lami said during an interview in the Serbian capital Belgrade. And it has an alternative vision, and this is a darker vision. It is a position that resembles oligarchy, corruption, strong state control, is much more like a police state. There is also that vision, and these things differ in this part of the world”.

The major obstacles Serbia must overcome to join the bloc surface on the streets of Belgrade. The increasingly authoritarian government led by President Allexander Vuciq, who recently hosted Dodik with open arms, is being severely tested by a wave of protests on an unprecedented scale in Serbia.

Hundreds of thousands have marched against government corruption, in demonstrations organised by students on the collapse of a concrete shelter at a renovated railway station in the city of Novi Sad that killed 16 people in November. They keep blocking the streets every day.

They have even expanded their protests to reject a construction proposed by US President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kouchner. The hotel complex is planned at the bombing site of the former Yugoslav Defence Ministry, a memorial for NATO air strikes that brought an end to the war with Kosovo in 1999. Students link that plan to other real estate agreements they say are corrupt. Many in the country also resent the profit of the Trump family from a country destroyed by a Washington-led bombing campaign.

Lami said that “stood by the people”, before raising the issue of protests and claims of using sound weapons during a meeting with Vuciqi at his presidential palace. The British foreign secretary was there to sign a series of agreements with the dual purposes of dealing with illegal migration and maintaining Serbia closer to the West.

But it was clear in a statement to the media that Vuciqi, the long-standing populist who has spent more than a decade at the top of Serbian politics, kindly rejected the challenge. I have no intention of making any comments about protests and demonstrations in Great Britain as I respect the sovereignty of Great Britain”, he told Serbia's strongly controlled media.

Vuciqi also denied that power or acoustic weapons against protesters had been used and strongly defended Dodik after Lami raised his <x0-cyto-unconstitutional actions” during their media statements. (The Serbian government did not respond to requests for an interview).

EU flags do not fly in protests. Students perceive that Brussels has turned a blind eye to the cosmic corruption they are condemning, as the EU tries to bring Vuciqiqi into the circle and gain access to Serbia's lithium deposits for battery producers of electric vehicles.

Unlike other countries in the Balkans, Serbian approval for EU membership does not seem overwhelming, and broad support for Russia remains. The process could be even more difficult if the country must recognise Kosovo as a condition for membership. Graphics throughout Belgrade claim that “Kosovo is Serbia”. A denial of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys is visible by the central square of the Republic. The usual, too, is “q* NATO, fuck! The EU”.

Serbia has discretely allowed its ammunition to end in Ukraine, but it is one of two European countries that does not sanction Russia. Its leadership contributes to EU membership, but also maintains close relations with Moscow and China, with which Belgrade deepens economic and military ties. “Paradox is alive here”, Lami said.

Lami's visit to the region began in Kosovo's capital, Pristina, where his reception could no longer be warm. Britain, the US and NATO are considered with the highest respect there that helped Kosovo in the war with Serbia. A generation of children named Tonibler, Clinton or Madeleine according to Western leaders who helped the nation gain independence are now in the middle of 20.

In an interview in her office, Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani, a 40-year-old energetic who has held the top post since 2021, makes it very clear that everything is not good in relations with Serbia, which she describes as their crazy hegemony”.

The recent fire crises include the siege of a Serbian Orthodox monastery in the village of Banjska in northern Kosovo in 2023 by armed men in armoured vehicles. A police officer and three Serb attackers were killed in a serious clash Kosovo blames Serbia, which Belgrade rejects.

Then there was an explosion that damaged energy and water systems in an important channel last December, which Kosovo called “terrorist attack”. Serbia denied involvement and claimed the incident was being used as an excuse to hit Serbs in Kosovo.

Acting Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whom Belgrade accuses of suppressing Serbs in his country, has long warned that “the threat of another fight” is real, citing Serbia's intensified co-operation with what Osman calls the “evil triangle” Russia, China and Iran. Vuciqi has also repeatedly repeated the omens of a new conflict in the region, claiming that Kosovo is treating the Serb community unfairly.

NATO-led troops from 29 countries in KFOR are crucial to maintaining fragile peace.
Yeah. LITICO was at their base at Camp <x0m City”, while British troops told Lami they believed Russia is supporting Serbian activities in Kosovo, including intelligence operations, which a senior official in Pristina confirmed. Soldiers also monitor political rallies and elections, as well as the main infrastructure following the Iber-Lepenci Canal explosion.

Osmani claims Serbia has intervened in Kosovo's recent general elections; that “The Serb-Russian Humanitarian Centre” on the border with Kosovo is really a “Russian spying centre”; and that Moscow has tripled the amount spent on dezination in the Western Balkans since the invasion of Ukraine.

She insists that America under the Trump is a reliable ally, but warns that if Putin appears encouraged by the US-led peacekeeping talks with Ukraine, the Balkans may be “fertile soil” for a “extension” of that conflict.

If these autocrats seeking destabilisation are able to do whatever they want... things can escalate very, very quickly in this region”, she says. So preventing and braking are essential, and we should not allow Putin to have his way. The volcano has been waving with Putin's melody for a long time. It is time for him to decide where he wants to take his country”.

Lami was traveling to the region with Karen Pierce, British special envoy recently appointed for the Western Balkans. By February, Pierce was Britain's ambassador to Washington, where she was widely praised for her work with both the Benden administration and Trump. It has a long history in the region, and its appointment is seen as confirmation that “as seriously taking the United Kingdom to the Balkans”, a European diplomat said.

At Osman's meeting with Lammy, the president pressured him to sign an economic and security agreement that would include bilateral arms purchase and more joint operations between their troops. She also said she had “officially extended” her country's readiness to join the peacekeeping force that Great Britain and France are trying to organise for Ukraine, but she conditioned it with the UK's signing of its desired agreement.

The president hit “active compliance” by unidentified parties in the EU, which she criticised for continuing to give money to Serbia despite tensions. Kosovo officially applied to join the bloc in 2022, but is still not recognised by five member states and told, like Serbia, that it has to do more to normalise relations.

She said Lami must tell Vuciqi that “stops attacking his neighbours, very clearly and simply”, though in the interview with POLITICO he refused to credit any guilt for the Banjska siege.

(POLITICO) says British officials acknowledge there is evidence of Serbian involvement.

“Running slowly”

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dodik, the unabated president of the country's Serb-run entity, was sentenced to one year in prison and six years in detention to hold public office for rejecting the orders of the international peace envoy, whose position was set to prevent the region from slipping into war. Since then, he has been avoided a nationwide warrant to be welcomed by Vuciqi in Serbia and by Putin in Moscow.

The United States and Britain have sanctioned that in recent years, but there are those who want them to go further, like Arminka Helich, a refugee of Yugoslav wars, now a member of the Chamber of Lords of the United Kingdom.

“We have imposed certain sanctions, but they are not devastating”, the former British government adviser for foreign policy said. It has also appealed to the United Kingdom ministers to send troops to the EU peacekeeping operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Lami does not rule out the possibility of striking Dodik with new sanctions, refusing to comment on such measures, except to say that “is always being considered”.

A disaster scenario that Helic predicts is that Dodik, positioning as the right “of the right hand” and presenting himself as the victim of a large left “”, may be successful in calling on Trump to recognise his region's independence in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In one of Belgrade's smoke-filled bars, Helena Ivanov, a researcher in the group of Society Experts “Henry Jackson”, warned that the EU cannot afford to lose “Serbia, given geopolitical circumstances, argued this could cause a wave of problems throughout the region.

If you were back in Yugoslavia, if anyone paid more attention to what was happening here in the years of '80s, I think things could have gone very different. I think the West woke up with the realities of what was happening in Yugoslavia, a little too late”, she said.

And I'm wondering if something very similar can happen right now, not that we're talking about a similar outcome like you're starting a war, not a war, but waking up in a reality where the effects of Russia and China are so deeply rooted in this country as it's a bit too late”

Helic agrees that the West is paying very little attention, and he attributes this to Russia's gradual procrastination in the region.

It's like a disease because it's developing slowly and invisibly. It is not a cut; it is like an infection and an infectious disease that slowly burns”, she said.

There is the influence of state media “Russia Today” and “Sputnik”, as well as the Russian Orthodox Church associated with the Kremlin. Dezinformation campaigns are also under way on social networks.

Like Ivanov, Helic thinks the danger can become apparent to foreigners very suddenly if Putin is allowed to continue his course, but perhaps only when it is too late.

The “could go from bad to horror overnight because this has been a process of breaking down state institutions since 2006, all that we have achieved after the wars at 95”, Helic said. “Russia does not want a stable Balkans, because it is a constant and endless toothache for the West and fits Russia very well”.