Did the new fighters from Serbia go to fight in Ukraine?

 

"Our country is very clear that the participation of Serbian citizens in all conflicts in other countries is prohibited, and this entails legal consequences," he said and added that Serbia wants to calm the situation and tensions everywhere in the world and in Ukraine.

 

He called on those who have a "patriotic positive charge" in Serbia to demonstrate their combat abilities in the units of the Serbian Army.

 

Fighting on foreign battlefields is, by the way, a criminal offense in Serbia.

 

 

On the social network vKontakte in mid-January, photos were published that allegedly show Serbian fighters who arrived in the Zaporozhye region in Ukraine.

 

The publication states that they arrived from Belgrade despite the ban of the authorities in Serbia.

 

It is also stated that they are part of Pavle Sudoplatov's Russian battalion. The words of the "head of the region" Yevgeniy Balicki, who said that the Serbian fighters partly showed their "loyalty to Russia", are also quoted.

 

RFE/RL was unable to confirm the identity and origin of the people in the photos, as most of the faces are not visible. It is also not possible to determine the location and time of the photos.

 

At the same time, a video was published on the Telegram platform that allegedly shows a group of fighters from Serbia who are claimed to have joined Pavle Sudoplatov's battalion.

 

Sudoplatov was a member of the intelligence services of the Soviet Union during World War II.

 

They wear masks over their faces, and in the Serbian language video they claim that they have come to "help our brothers".

 

In the video, one of the alleged fighters also comments on the situation in Kosovo, which he states is unpredictable.

 

The information that Serbian fighters joined the Pavel Sudoplatov battalion was also reported by some Russian media.

 

Consequences of "pro-Russian policy" in Serbia

The issue of Serbian fighters in Ukraine has burdened relations between Kyiv and Belgrade for years.

 

Serbia has never published official data on how many of its citizens have left since 2014 to fight on the Russian side in Ukraine. The estimates of the embassy of Ukraine from 2019 are that it is about 300 people.

 

So far, more than 30 verdicts have been passed against Serbian citizens who fought on the Russian side in Ukraine.

 

In the days before the invasion of Ukraine, the authorities in Belgrade announced that they would not tolerate Serbian fighters joining Russian forces.

 

However, after the invasion of Ukraine, Serbia, which is a candidate for EU membership, refused to impose sanctions on Russia, but officials condemned Russian aggression.

 

In a statement to RSE, Predrag Petrović from the Belgrade Center for Security Policy states that officials in Serbia usually do not advertise about posts on social networks that fighters from Serbia are being recruited for the war in Ukraine.

 

He believes that the reason is that they themselves are "victims of the pro-Russian policy they allowed" in Serbia.

 

"It is very difficult for them to condemn such actions more decisively because there is quite a strong pro-Russian sentiment in Serbia," says Petrović, adding that Russian propaganda is promoted through media and tabloids close to the regime.

 

Petrović believes that social networks facilitate the recruitment of fighters from Serbia for the Ukrainian battlefield, and that "this type of propaganda is particularly strong since the Serbian extreme right-wingers were in Russia."

 

"We are talking about the People's Patrol and the connections with the Wagner group, and that all contributes to the creation of a pro-war atmosphere on the networks," he said.

 

Damjan Knežević, the leader of the right-wing organization "People's Patrol" visited the military-technology center of the Wagner paramilitary group in Russia in November.

 

"Many of my friends will be proud that I had the honor of visiting the Wagner Center. That center and that organization are extremely popular in Serbia," Knežević said at the time in a video for Russian media.

 

Petrović assesses that the fact that information about new fighters in Ukraine is publicly published on social networks, even though it is a criminal act, does not represent a mockery of the security forces in Serbia.

"They do it with a great deal of pride because they belong to pro-Russian military units. They see themselves as elite forces that sided with the Russian people. This contributes to the spread of that kind of propaganda," he believes.

 

 

Petrović says that these events and posts on social networks are politically damaging to Serbia.

 

"It only gives arguments to a part of the Western public that Serbia is a small Russia and that, as a Russian exponent in the Balkans, it can cause some conflicts. It is difficult for Serbia (officials, ed.) to distance itself from Russia itself and the policy of sitting on multiple chairs ", says Petrović.

 

 

The role of RUSOV

In the video and photos, only one person does not have his face hidden. RSE has detected that it is Andrey Rodionov, the founder of the movement "Russian-Slavic Unification and Revival" (RUSOV).

 

The main goals of this movement in its Manifesto are the "revival of Great Russia" and the "unification and revival of the autochthonous state-forming Russian people and other autochthonous peoples of Russia on the basis of a common Russian national identity", as well as the creation of a "federal federal Slavic state headed by Great Russia".

 

In the last few years, Rodionov has been in Serbia several times, as well as in the surrounding countries. He is a frequent guest of Serbian right-wing internet portals and podcasts, and in November 2020 he spoke for the state Radio Belgrade 2.

 

In October 2020, Rodionov also met with the former general of the Yugoslav Army, Božidar Delic, founder of the non-governmental organization "Ljubav, vera, nada".

 

In addition to Serbia, the leader of the RUSOV movement was also a guest in North Macedonia and Bulgaria in previous years, and on his social networks Andrej Rodionov posted a photo of himself posing next to the sign "Kosovska Mitrovica" in the north of Kosovo.

 

Rodionov accompanied this photo, published on Facebook, with the comment "Crimea is Russia, Kosovo is Serbia. The Slovenian sun is rising."

 

On his Facebook profile, Andrei Rodionov glorifies the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine almost every day.

 

He published a video and photos of Serbian fighters on his Telegram channel, and stated that at his invitation, two of them joined Pavle Sudoplatov's battalion.

 

Čedomir Stojković, a lawyer from Belgrade and one of the founders of the Belgrade citizens' association "Grupa Oktobar", which strongly criticizes Russia's influence on Serbia, said on Twitter, after the publication of information about the fighters, that the EU, USA and Great Britain must sanction the authorities in Belgrade .

 

"Putin is recruiting Serbs in the middle of Serbia to kill Ukrainians," Stojković stated, among other things.

 

Information about Serbian fighters in Russian units also appeared in December 2022. It was published in a video by Dejan Berić, a Serbian citizen who fought as a sniper on the side of pro-Russian separatists in Donetsk, Ukraine, for which he is being tried in absentia in Serbia.

 

A video posted on December 11 on Berić's YouTube channel shows a group of people talking in Serbian about what they say is their training to fight in Ukraine.

In the video, they explain how they learn to shoot and throw grenades during the training and invite the citizens of Serbia to join the fight.

 

The authorities in Serbia did not publicly announce the video.

 

A mural in honor of Wagner

 

On January 14, a mural in honor of the notorious Russian unit Wagner appeared in Belgrade. The authors are extreme right-wingers from the informal organization "Narodna patrola", who shared the post on their Telegram channel.

 

The leader of this organization, Damjan Knežević, as seen in the photos from January 14, is standing in front of the newly created mural in honor of the Wagner unit.

 

Members of the Wagner mercenary group, which was founded eight years ago by a Russian businessman close to the Kremlin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, are accused by human rights activists of war crimes in Syria and eastern Ukraine since 2014, and also participated in the invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. .

 

The mural was condemned on Twitter by activists of the informal organization "Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Serbs Against War", who criticize Vladimir Putin's regime from Serbia.

 

A day later, the mural was painted over.

 

The second mural dedicated to Wagner appeared in 2021 in New Belgrade. The painting was organized by the leader of the non-parliamentary "Serbian Right" Miša Vacić.

 

The case of the Wagner group ad

 

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, Ivica Dacic, said on January 16 that he had not heard about the advertisement of the Russian paramilitary group "Vagner" for the application of volunteers, which was published on the Serbian service Russia Today (RT), and added that Serbia punishes everyone who participates in hostilities abroad. transmitted by Beta.

 

"I don't really know what it is about, but there are clear laws that define that Serbia does not allow participation and punishes all those who take part in hostilities outside the territory of Serbia," he told reporters and added that this applies to all parties "whether talk about Russia, Ukraine or the Islamic State".

 

In January, the portal RT published the news about the advertisement of the Wagner group for the recruitment of volunteers. The ad does not refer to Serbia, it is an ad for all potential volunteers. In the news titled "Vagnerovci published an ad for volunteers, the conditions are more than tempting" details are given about the conditions for participation in the war, earnings and training.

 

However, that news can no longer be found on RT's website, it has been changed and talks about a group of former prisoners who volunteered to participate in a military operation on the Russian side. At the end of the news, it was only stated that "Wagner" published an advertisement on social networks for the recruitment of new members.

 

The Russian state channel RT announced on November 15 that it has started broadcasting online (online), i.e. web content of its program in the Serbian language.

 

RT, as a media controlled by the Kremlin and financed from the state budget, has been banned from broadcasting in the European Union since March 2022.