Insincere friendship between Serbia and Russia

The Serbian media scene is flooded with Kremlin propaganda narratives, Vladimir Putin is the favorite statesman, and Russia is seen as the promised land.

The thesis of eternal Russian-Serbian friendship has long since become a dogma in the local public, embodied in the fan slogan "Russians and Serbs - brothers forever". Permanent propaganda shaped the attitudes of Serbian citizens, which led to a mental separation from reality. Public opinion surveys show that the majority of citizens think that Russia is not to blame for the war against Ukraine, that Russia is Serbia's most important foreign policy partner, and even that Russia is the country that provides the most economic assistance to Serbia, even though there is no such assistance at all.

The Serbian media scene is flooded with Kremlin propaganda narratives, Vladimir Putin is the favorite statesman, Russia is seen as the promised land, and nationalists hope that the Russian dictator will overthrow the international legal order and establish a new world in which Serbia will have the opportunity to finish what it started. in the nineties and to finally expand the territories. After the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine, Serbia persistently refuses to impose Russian sanctions, although it would have to do so, because it has undertaken to harmonize its foreign policy with the foreign policy of the European Union.

A fake fraternal state

Aleksandar Vučić is trying to sit on more chairs, so when he did not introduce sanctions against Russia, he still had to offer some kind of satisfaction to the Western partners. The Financial Times published an estimate that, indirectly, through other countries, since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Kiev, Serbia has exported grenades worth 800 million euros to Ukraine.

Vučić confirmed for this newspaper that the information about the value of the ammunition is mostly correct, and he presented the trade as a business opportunity. He explained that Serbia cannot export ammunition directly to Ukraine or Russia, but that it has contracts with Americans, Spaniards, Czechs and others. In the end, he concluded: "We have friends in Kiev and Moscow." These are our Slavic brothers."

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reacted calmly: "We will deal with this topic in contacts with our Serbian friends." Kremlin propagandists sounded much more agitated, or rather - they were overcome with anger. Sergej Mardan screamed that the grenades exported by Serbia to the West were eventually fired at Russian positions in Vulhedar, Bahmut, Rabotin and other places. After that, he stopped choosing his words, anger rose from the depths of the insulted imperial soul: "After this, do you consider Serbia a brotherly state? We have no brothers in the world, damned. Serbia behaves like the last blood, that is indisputable."

Systematic forgetting

Hard words were spoken, it is not easy these days for Serbian Putinophiles, especially those who belong to the Serbian Progressive Party. Four years ago, Serbia celebrated the 180th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Russia and Serbia. Vučić then said that during those 180 years "we never went against each other", which is "a rare example and case of any nation in the world", and now he was waiting for Putin's megaphones to insult him like dog carts.

Then Sergej Lavrov and Ivica Dacic wrote a text in four hands and published it in Politica under the title "Serbia and Russia - 180 years of friendship, trust and cooperation", and now it turns out that we are no longer brothers. Perhaps the story of Serbian-Russian friendship and brotherly love is just a legend after all. Maybe that friendship is not quite as sincere as the Russian colonists here imagine.

The history of Russian-Serbian relations is not quite as idyllic as it is presented in official propaganda. All inconvenient facts that do not fit into the story that Russia has always been the mother and protector of Serbia are erased from the collective memory. The fact that Russia signed Resolution No. 757 of the UN Security Council, adopted on May 30, 1992, obliges the signatory states to prevent "the importation into their territory of all goods originating from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)." ". The resolution also included other forms of sanctions, such as the ban on the participation of FRY representatives in sports competitions, the suspension of scientific and technical cooperation and cultural exchanges.

Sanctions and the Hague Court

In November 1992, Russia also signed Resolution No. 787 of the Security Council, which expands the list of sanctions, prohibits the export of energy and other raw materials to the FRY, and condemns "all violations of international humanitarian law, including in particular the practice of 'ethnic cleansing' and deliberate obstruction." delivery of food and medical supplies to the civilian population of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina". On May 25, 1993, the UN Security Council passed the historic Resolution No. 827, which established the Hague Tribunal.

Russia supported the establishment of the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia, and Yuliy Mikhailovich Vorontsov, the first Russian permanent representative to the UN, spoke at the founding session. Vorontsov said: "Russia has led an unwavering course of stopping war crimes and cannot remain indifferent to flagrant mass violations of international humanitarian law on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. The murders, rapes and ethnic cleansing must stop immediately, and the culprits - regardless of their affiliation - must be duly punished.

Friendly West and hostile Russia

All the listed facts are systematically pushed into the darkness of oblivion, as if they never happened, so that the myth of the ideal Serbian-Russian friendship would remain intact. The Informburo Resolution from 1948, by which the Soviet Union sought to subjugate Yugoslavia and turn it into a puppet state, its satellite, is also consigned to oblivion.

Russophiles do not want to remember the historical "no" of the Yugoslav and Serbian leadership, nor how Soviet military forces were deployed in Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria on the border with Serbia, with a detailed plan for the invasion. It is not allowed to remember how Stalin established a complete economic and traffic blockade of Yugoslavia, nor the large number of our border guards who died at the hands of the Soviets and their servants. In fact, our Russophiles cannot forgive the Serbian and Yugoslav communists for not signing the Informburo Resolution and voluntarily agreeing to be slaves.

The Russian colonists would somehow justify all the listed facts and find some excuse for their beloved empire, but they cannot in any way for the San Stefano Peace of March 1878, then Russia bit them in the heart, so they completely erased that event from their memory. Then Russia created Greater Bulgaria, which expanded at the expense of Serbia, even Niš ended up in Bulgaria.

To make matters worse, Serbia was helped by Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the same year they organized the Congress of Berlin at which Serbia's confiscated territories were returned. Such events do not at all fit into the propaganda story about the evil West, which has always hated Serbia and mother Russia, which has always been on the Serbian side. As we can see, in reality it was actually the other way around.

Against a common enemy

The listed historical moments spoil the idyllic image of Russian-Serbian friendship, just like today's outbursts of anger by Sergej Mardan, but all that is essentially secondary. Russian colonists are confused by such disagreements, because they destroy their monolithic image of the world, although they could calmly ignore all this, if only they were honest with themselves and their own beliefs. True, Vučić's Serbia exports ammunition to Ukraine, but not out of a sincere desire to help Ukrainians in the fight against the Russian aggressor, but out of mere interest, a little economic and a little more political - to reduce pressure from the West.

With the money it receives from this trade transaction, the progressive regime will not build a democratic system, but will continue to build an autocratic state, according to the Russian model. Just as it has been using European Union aid and Western investments for years to build an anti-European system and a Russian governorate in the middle of Europe.

The question of whether the friendship between Serbia and Russia is sincere may not be the most happily formulated. One can talk about sincere friendship between sincere, honest, virtuous people, and such people do not sit in either the Serbian or the Russian establishment. This is not about true friendship, but about teaming up against a common enemy. And that common opponent is what the Kremlin propaganda calls the term "collective West" and everything that that entity embodies.

A dam against democratic values

Russian and Serbian people are truly afraid of liberalism, rule of law, tripartite division of power, respect for personality, human dignity, freedom of speech and opinion, equality before the law, solidarity and other democratic values. The conservative, nationalist majority sees Russia as the only dam that will protect them from these decadent Western scourges. Russia appears as a convenient auxiliary tool in maintaining a conservative, collectivist, populist ideology that persistently refuses modernization and joining the democratic world.

As Latinka Perović once said: "Russian influence here is not the result of force alone, but to a large extent comes on prepared ground, because neither nation has significantly moved away from its key paradigms - obsession with the idea of a large state and patrimonial social values." . And these ideas are directly opposed to the democratic order, the regulation of society and the rule of law.

The relations between the Serbian and Russian regimes are somewhat reminiscent of the relations between bandits. Criminals cannot be sincere friends, because they are not united by a common desire for good or some positive ideal. However, they are united by their hostility towards law, order and sanctified human values. Robbers can fight each other, settle accounts, stab the other in the back, but they are condemned to each other, because they cut themselves off from the honest, civilized world.