Bosnia: Moscow’s Second Front in Europe
The Kremlin is playing games behind the scenes in the Balkans, presenting the West with a challenge and an opportunity.
According to British Intelligence, and Foreign Secretary David Lammy, Vladimir Putin wants the Western Balkans to be his “next playground.”
This is a late recognition of something that has been going on for years. The entire Balkans region has for too long been Putin’s playground, or second front, in Europe.
Moscow has waged an unrelenting campaign to destabilize Moldova, enjoys substantial influence in Bulgaria and has been revealed as trying to subvert Romania’s election.
Moscow’s chief ally in Bosnia is the president of the Republika Srpska entity, Milorad Dodik, a man so keen to emphasize his affiliation with Putin that he awarded him a high honor in 2023. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dodik’s political career was marked by efforts to align Republika Srpska with Western democratic values and institutions.
In 1998, he emerged as a reformist leader in Republika Srpska, gaining Western support for his moderate stances. He was recognized for acknowledging the Bosnian Serb army’s Srebrenica 1995 massacre as genocide and opposing wartime nationalists.
This approach earned him backing from the United States and Europe, leading to his appointment as Prime Minister of Republika Srpska. However, after losing power in 2001, Dodik returned to the political scene in 2006 with an increasingly nationalist and pro-Russian agenda.
While Dodik has proven himself a political opportunist, his radicalization and close affiliation with the Kremlin have been rooted in two external developments: the recognition of Kosovo’s secession from Serbia by the West in 2008, and efforts by Sarajevo and many Western countries to centralize Bosnia in a way that was not explicitly outlined by the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords.
For Dodik and many Serbs — both in Bosnia and Serbia — the expansion of Sarajevo’s authorities’ post-Kosovo’s recognition went beyond both the letter and the spirit of Dayton, which kept post-war Bosnia intact by promising to preserve a balance between the three constituent nations. They viewed the establishment of state-level institutions, such as a unified military command and the State Border Service by the High Representative through the “Bonn Powers,” as superseding Bosnia’s two entities — Republika Srpska and the Federation.
Not mentioned in the Dayton text, these Bonn Powers provided the High Representative with the ability to impose laws and remove officials without the consent of all of Bosnia’s constituent nations, which many Bosnian Serbs argue runs counter to the very essence of Dayton.
It is in this context that the Kremlin encourages Dodik to push back against the “anti-Dayton” actions of Sarajevo and the High Representative by intensifying his secessionist threats, withdrawing from Bosnian state institutions established “outside of Dayton,” and rejecting the High Representative’s Bonn Powers. Due to his impulsive behavior and dangerous rhetoric, and left with few partners or allies, Dodik is almost entirely dependent on Moscow.
In February, a Bosnian court sentenced him to jail for defying the High Representative, creating the biggest crisis in Bosnia since the war and one that could destabilize the entire region.
The Kremlin’s encouragement of its proxy Dodik could not come at a worse time for Serbian President Aleksander Vučić, who often states that Serbia “respects the territorial integrity of Bosnia and the integrity of Republika Srpska within Bosnia.”
And the fact that Dodik chose this moment to make his move belies the simplistic idea that he is Vučić’s man in Bosnia. Serbia’s government is under enormous domestic pressure from large-scale demonstrations resulting from likely corruption and corner-cutting during a Chinese-run infrastructure project that caused the collapse of a railway station canopy in Serbia’s second largest city, killing 15.
Moreover, while Vučić is said to have privately welcomed US sanctions imposed at the end of the Biden administration to evict Russian Gazpromneft from its ownership of Serbia’s national oil company, NIS, Moscow has refused to relinquish control and seems happy to sacrifice the Serbian economy as foreign banks begin to wind down their engagement with NIS.
Vučić, a master politician who bases much of his domestic legitimacy on Serbia’s growth and development, would hardly incite Dodik to undertake such reckless measures when the economic rug might be pulled out from under him.
Indeed, this looming economic crisis can be traced to Serbia’s dependence on Russian energy, and the sale of a majority stake in NIS to Gazpromneft in 2008, i.e. before Vučić took power.
Indeed, Dodik’s behavior has the Kremlin’s fingerprints all over it. On April 1, he traveled to Moscow to meet Putin, where he stated that Moscow was not only the guarantor of Dayton, but that Russia will advocate for termination of the work of international institutions in Bosnia, particularly the High Representative.
Dodik is also apparently lobbying the Trump administration to set aside his blacklisting, evidently believing that its efforts at a rapprochement with Moscow could extend to giving Putin a crowbar with which to further destabilize Bosnia.
In this context, the Trump administration should instead make clear to Moscow that any resolution of the war in Ukraine and serious reengagement with the United States must be accompanied by the Kremlin reining in Dodik and playing a constructive role in aligning Bosnia with the letter and spirit of Dayton. The Balkans are too critical to European security, if not international order, for the US simply to acquiesce in Russia’s games on its second front for no commensurate Western or American gain.
A Ukraine settlement that ignores Bosnia and the Balkans would result in Putin merely pocketing those gains and then encouraging and amplifying further instability across the Balkans.
NATO and its EUFOR mission in Bosnia have indicated that they are ready to prevent the destabilization of Bosnia. And were Dodik to challenge both the West and Vučić by declaring Republika Srpska’s independence, they would undoubtedly step in and restore the Dayton settlement that is consistent with the legitimate requirements of all three constituent nations.
Doing so would allow Vučić’s to at least partially free himself from the Russian incubus and Moscow’s disingenuous efforts to portray itself as a friend of the Serbian people.
In other words, if Dodik were to carry out his threats, this crisis, like many others, could provide not just a challenge but also an opportunity. And in that case, this would present an opportunity that should not be missed.
Stephen Blank is Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Research Institute www.fpri.org
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