Putin wants Western Balkans as his next ‘playground,’ UK warns

BELGRADE — Alarm bells are ringing in Belgrade, Kosovo and Sarajevo.

While Europe’s attention has been focused on Ukraine, tensions in the Western Balkans have been simmering, and leaders in the region — as well as in Britain — worry Russian President Vladimir Putin will use the moment to further exploit fault lines in the former Yugoslavia.

The Western Balkans are described as “the other hotspot” by figures in the upper echelons of the U.K. government — and with the heat now being turned up, Britain is pushing for all six states in the region to join the EU to ward off Russian influence.

“At this time, with war in Europe and seeing the long hand of Russian interference also in the region, you would be a fool if you took your eye off the Western Balkans, where there are still legacy issues that are yet to be overcome,” British Foreign Secretary David Lammy told POLITICO during a visit to the region last week.

“Putin’s interests here are to keep the region destabilized. It’s in his interests to keep the countries that make up the Western Balkans on edge, to have a destabilized population and to wage a cyber and hybrid war.”

All six western Balkan states are attempting to become EU member states, a protracted process in which geopolitics can be as important as fulfilling alignment tasks. They face significant challenges, both domestically and with their neighbors. Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, has been pushed into crisis as Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the country’s three-way presidency, evades arrest for his separatist policies. Meanwhile, Serbia accuses Kosovo of repressing its Serb minority, while Kosovo blames Serbia for violence within its territory. 

Foreign policy experts and ministers alike fear the Kremlin will try to capitalize on the deep-seated ethnic and religious tensions to stoke further unrest across the Balkans, entrenching Russia’s own interests and creating yet more troubles in the EU’s backyard.

“Right now they must move forward or they will continue to be Russia’s playground,” said one U.K. official, granted anonymity to discuss matters they were not authorized to comment on publicly. There is now “quite a small window” in which the Balkan states need to “stop sitting on the fence” before Brussels is instead consumed by Ukraine’s accession, they said.

‘Paradox is alive here’

Lammy believes that Serbia — despite the democratic backsliding, the cozying up to Russia, and its continued refusal to recognize Kosovo — genuinely wants to accede to the EU, a process it started back in 2009.

“But there are different perspectives about how to get there and how quickly and how seriously,” Lammy said during an interview in the Serbian capital Belgrade. “And there is an alternative vision, and that is a darker vision. It’s a position that harks to oligarchy, corruption, heavy state control, much more of a police state. There’s that vision as well, and those things are contested in this part of the world.”

The huge hurdles Serbia must overcome to join the bloc are on stark display on the streets of Belgrade. The increasingly authoritarian government led by President Aleksandar Vučić, who recently welcomed Dodik with open arms, is being severely tested by a wave of protests on a scale never before seen in Serbia. 

Vučić denied force or acoustic weapons had been used against protesters. | John Thys/AFP via Getty Images

Hundreds of thousands have marched against government corruption, in demonstrations organized by students over a canopy collapse at a renovated railway station in the city of Novi Sad that killed 16 people in November. They continue to blockade roads daily.

They’ve even extended their protests to counter a proposed luxury real estate development by U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The hotel complex is planned on the site of the bombed-out former Yugoslav defense ministry, a memorial to the NATO airstrikes that brought the war with Kosovo to a close in 1999. The students link that plan to other real estate deals they say are corrupt. Many in the country also feel distaste at the Trump family’s profiting from a site wrecked by a bombing campaign led by Washington.

The students’ decentralized model of organizing means there is no clear leader that can be targeted in a crackdown, but the authorities have been accused of using an illegal sound cannon against demonstrators. Belgrade has also said that Russia’s spy services helped respond to the unrest.

Lammy told POLITICO that “we stand alongside the people,” before raising the protests and the sonic weapon use claims during a Wednesday meeting with Vučić at his presidential palace. The foreign secretary was there to sign a series of accords with the twin aims of tackling illegal migration and holding Serbia closer to the West.

But it was clear in a statement to assembled broadcasters that Vučić, the 6-foot-6-inch populist who has spent more than a decade at the top of Serbian politics, did not take kindly to being challenged. “It doesn’t even occur to me to make any comments on protests and demonstrations in Great Britain since I respect the sovereignty of Great Britain,” he told Serbia’s tightly controlled media.

Vučić also denied that force or acoustic weapons had been used against protesters, and issued a staunch defense of Dodik after Lammy raised his “unconstitutional” actions during their statements to the press. (The Serbian government did not respond to requests for an interview.)

EU flags are not waved at the protests. Students perceive Brussels as having turned a blind eye to the endemic corruption they are condemning, as the EU tries both to bring Vučić into the fold and to gain access to Serbia’s lithium deposits for electric-vehicle battery-makers. 

Unlike elsewhere in the Balkans, Serbian approval for joining the EU doesn’t appear overwhelming, and widespread support for Russia remains. The process could be even harder if the country has to recognize Kosovo as a condition for accession. Graffiti throughout Belgrade claims “Kosovo is Serbia.” A denial of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys is visible from the central Republic Square. Common, too, are daubings of “fuck NATO fuck EU.”  

Serbia has discreetly allowed its ammunition to end up in Ukraine, but it is one of just two European countries not to sanction Russia. Its leadership advocates joining the EU, but it also maintains close relations with Moscow and China, with whom Belgrade has been deepening economic and military ties. “Paradox is alive here,” as Lammy put it.

Fault lines and overtures in Kosovo

Lammy’s visit to the region began 150 miles south in Kosovo, where in the capital Pristina his welcome could not have been warmer. Britain, the U.S. and NATO are held in the highest regard there for coming to Kosovo’s aid in the war with Serbia. A generation of children named Tonibler, Clinton or Madeleine after the Western leaders who helped the nation win independence are now in their mid-20s.

In an interview with POLITICO in her office, Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani, an energetic millennial who has held high office since 2021, makes it very clear all is not well in relations with Serbia, which she describes as their “crazy hegemonic neighbor.”

Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani is an energetic millennial who has held high office since 2021. | Armend Nimani/AFP via Getty Images

Recent flashpoints include the siege of a Serbian Orthodox monastery in Banjska village in northern Kosovo in 2023 by gunmen in armored vehicles. One policeman and three ethnic Serb attackers were killed in a heavy firefight that Kosovo blames on Serbia, which Belgrade disputes.

Then there was an explosion that damaged energy and water systems at a crucial canal last December, which Kosovo called a “terrorist attack.” Serbia denied involvement and alleged the incident was being used as a pretext to crack down on Serbs in Kosovo.  

Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whom Belgrade accuses of repressing Serbs in his country, has long warned that the “threat of another war” is real, citing Serbia’s intensifying cooperation with what Osmani calls the “triangle of evil” — Russia, China and Iran. Vučić has also frequently repeated the omen of a new conflict in the region, claiming Kosovo is treating the Serb community unfairly.

NATO-led troops from 29 countries assigned to the Kosovo Force, or KFOR, are crucial to maintaining the fragile peace. POLITICO was at their Camp Film City base as British troops told Lammy they believe Russia is supporting Serbian activities in Kosovo, including with intelligence operations, an assessment a senior official in Pristina confirmed. The soldiers also monitor political rallies and elections, as well as key infrastructure following the canal explosion.

Osmani alleges that Serbia interfered in Kosovo’s recent general elections; that the “Serbian-Russian Humanitarian Centre” on the border with Kosovo is really a “Russian spy center”; and that Moscow has tripled the amount spent on disinformation in the Western Balkans since invading Ukraine.

She insists that America under Trump is a reliable ally, but warns that if Putin emerges emboldened from U.S.-led peacekeeping talks with Ukraine, the Balkans could be “fertile ground” for a “spillover” of that conflict.

“If these autocrats seeking destabilization are able to do whatever they wish … things can escalate very, very quickly in this region,” she says. “So prevention and deterrence is key, and we should not allow Putin to have his way. Vučić has been dancing to Putin’s tune for way too long. It’s about time he decides where he wants to take his country.”

Lammy was traveling the region with Karen Pierce, the recently appointed special envoy to the Western Balkans. Until February, Pierce was Britain’s ambassador to Washington, where she was widely praised for her work with both the Biden and Trump administrations. She has a long history in the region, and her appointment is seen as confirming “just how seriously the U.K. takes the Balkans,” said one European diplomat.

In Osmani’s meeting with Lammy, the president pressed him over signing an economic and security deal that would include bilateral arms purchasing and more joint operations between their troops. She also told POLITICO she had “formally expressed” her country’s willingness to join the peacekeeping force that the U.K. and France are trying to organize for Ukraine — but she did make it conditional on the U.K. signing her desired deal.

The president hit out at the “active appeasement” by unnamed parties in the EU, whom she criticized for continuing to hand out money to Serbia despite the tensions. Kosovo formally applied to join the bloc in 2022, but is still not recognised by five member states and has been told, like Serbia, that it needs to do more to normalize relations.

She said Lammy should tell Vučić to “stop attacking his neighbors, very plain and simple,” though in the interview with POLITICO he declined to attribute any blame for the Banjska siege. (Privately, British officials admit there is evidence of Serbian involvement.)

‘It’s developing slowly’

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Dodik, the fiery president of the country’s Serb-run republic, was sentenced to a one-year prison term and a six-year ban on holding public office for defying the orders of the international peace envoy, whose position was created to stop the region slipping back into war. He has since evaded a nationwide arrest warrant to be greeted by Vučić in Serbia and by Putin in Moscow.

The U.S. and Britain have sanctioned him in recent years, but there are those who want them to go further, such as Arminka Helic, a refugee of the Yugoslav wars who is now a member of the U.K.’s House of Lords.

Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s three-way presidency. | Pool photo by Mikhail Tereshchenko/AFP via Getty Images

“We have imposed certain sanctions, but they’re not devastating,” said the former government foreign policy adviser. She also has advocated to ministers for the U.K. to send troops to the EU’s peacekeeping operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Lammy doesn’t rule out hitting Dodik with fresh sanctions, declining to comment on such measures except to say “they’re always kept under review.”

One disaster scenario Helic envisages is that Dodik, positioning himself as on the “right of the right” and falling victim to a “big leftwing conspiracy,” could succeed in appealing to Trump to recognize the independence of his region in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In one of Belgrade’s smoke-filled bars, Helena Ivanov, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society think tank, warned that the EU cannot “afford to lose” Serbia given the geopolitical circumstances, arguing it could trigger a ripple of problems across the region.

“If you go back to the Yugoslav time, had someone paid more attention to what was going on here in the ‘80s, I think things could have played out very differently. I think the West woke up to the realities of what was going on in Yugoslavia, too little, too late,” she said.

“And I’m wondering whether something very similar could happen right now, not in terms of the outcome being the same — like you’re getting a war, no — but waking up to a reality where Russia and Chinese influences are so deeply entrenched into this country that it’s too little, too late.”

Helic agrees that the West is paying too little attention, and attributes that to Russia’s gradual creep into the region.

“It’s like a disease because it’s developing slowly and invisibly. It’s not a cut; it’s like a slow-burning infection and contagion,” she said. 

There is the influence of state media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as the Kremlin-linked Russian Orthodox Church. Disinformation campaigns are being waged on social media as well.

Like Ivanov, Helic thinks the danger could become obvious to outsiders very suddenly if Putin is allowed to get his way, but perhaps only when it’s too late.

“It can go from bad to worse overnight because this has been a process of unravelling the state institutions since 2006, everything that we achieved after the wars in ’95,” Helic said. “Russia doesn’t want a stable Balkans because it’s a constant, never-ending toothache for the West, and it suits Russia just fine.”