The end may be near
The future of Russia will be above all Putin's personal destiny. From an arrogant autocrat who enjoyed the dull admiration of the world public, Putin becomes a poor, small, scared loser
The breakup of Yugoslavia was one of the expected origins of the weakness of the federal government in the face of growing separatism, in the vacuum created by the fall of communism, the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War. By an unusual historical induction, the breakup of Yugoslavia became the pattern for the breakup of the Soviet Union. Then the cessation of armed conflicts in Yugoslavia coincided with Putin's coming to power in Russia. In order to restore the Soviet empire, Putin used precisely the paradigm of the collapse of Yugoslavia, while he intervened militarily in the neighborhood, counting that, unlike Milošević, he would not be defeated. At the same time, all of Milošević's mistakes, except that he refrained from new armed aggression, were repeated by his successors, Koštunica, Tadić and Vučič. That's how they grew up and were raised, that's how their families, friends, godparents, services, the Russian and Serbian churches stuffed them. The strategic vertical of the Serbian project was no longer waiting for Russia to stand up again, and Milosevic waited too long, and did not wait. The Serbian project has become, since the surrender of the oil industry to Putin's mafia and the burning of the American embassy, an organic part of the project of rebuilding the Soviet empire. Carried away by Russia's first aggression against Ukraine, Vučić started to cause divisions and political disorder in the neighborhood, using soft power instead of armed force, corruption, services, propaganda. In this sense, the SPC is, for now, more effective than the JNA. After the decidedly genocidal character, contemporary Serbian nationalism is quisling, treacherous.
In the first days of the war, Russia failed to capture Kiev and install a puppet government. The strategic support of the USA and the majority solidarity of the EU contributed to the political and military consolidation of Ukraine. The West has not yet delivered the most modern systems that technologically surpass the Russian ones. The economy and society began to collapse instead of Europe succumbing to the need for cheap energy sources, the supply of which, quickly looking for alternatives, it successfully diversified. Russia's defeat in Ukraine is increasingly likely. Ukraine's demands for the return of theoretical integrity from 2015 are no longer questioned in the West. The network of Russian economic and political corruption has been exposed in the West. They began to think about the consequences of the defeat and the future of Russia.
The future of Russia will be above all Putin's personal destiny. From an arrogant autocrat who enjoyed the dull admiration of the world public, Putin becomes a poor, small, scared loser. There is an increasingly narrow political space between enraged nationalists who advocate for the continuation of the war and changes in the structure of government, and quasi-democratic movements who call for an end to the conflict and the beginning of new reforms. He is of the opinion that the political struggles, the first such conflicts after almost a quarter of a century since the resignation of Yeltsin and his family clique, will further weaken Russia in its efforts not to withdraw from Ukraine defeated. And while it has successfully manipulated centrism and separatism, when and as it suits it, Russia is also facing the continuation of disintegration to which it gave the opposite direction in the efforts to rebuild the Soviet empire.
Similarities between Russia and Serbia from the last 35 years become indicative, paradigmatic and anticipatory. At the beginning of the disintegration, Russia and Serbia were not able to define a new status of their independence, and to this day they have maintained an arrogant and aggressive attitude towards their neighbors, which is losing even when it is temporarily successful. The government is authoritarian, the economy is autarchic, the market is monopolized, the society is imbued with superfluous dilemmas and deadlocked conflicts. The cult of personality is maintained by media manipulation and militarization of every segment of the public and private sphere, education, culture, and religion. The executive power subordinated the judiciary and the legislature, the legislative bodies became meaningless, the clear boundaries between rights and official arbitrariness and violence, between justice and social solidarity, between the state, the church, entertainment and organized crime disappeared.
It is difficult to predict the moment and modality of Russia's collapse, but such a future is the duty of the Western world in terms of those preparations that were missing when Russia attacked Ukraine, in 2015, and then in 2022. And if it survives in its current form, Russia will be further impoverished, weak and unpredictable , sufficiently armed.
The EU also faces the paradox that Putin has no intention of withdrawing from Southeast Europe, which, along with the Baltic and the Black Sea, is one of Russia's strategic priorities and immediate malignant influence. Vučić managed to mobilize the nation on the platform of territorial claims, identity and cultural configuration. The opposition has a similar social background, attitudes and corruptive potential, and in relation to him, he is personally intellectually inferior. The opposition does not have a clear plan, how to get Serbia out of the paradigm of Vučić's Serbian world, how to rejuvenate society, start optimism, capital, individualism, education, how to distance itself from Russian orientalism, how to finally Europeanize Serbia. It is not enough to imagine a future in which Vučić will be brought into direct contact with Putin's intentions, which also refer to the EU, not only to the post-Soviet neighborhood, and Serbia is one of those pressure points. If true political alternatives to Vučić's increasingly stripped-down dictatorship and vassal relationship to the madman who almost caused the third world war will appear, Serbia will repeat its shabby delusion that it is only able to change under external pressure.
Croatia's entry into the Euro and Schengen zones is also a reminder that the EU will not provide security and political authority if the rest of Yugoslavia remains unintegrated. The basic prerequisites are for Serbia to normalize relations with Kosovo, for Montenegro to establish an internal agreement for the EU in the election process, for an agreement to be reached in BiH on how to survive as a whole that the Serb-Croat majority is against, while Vučić is compromised and Croatia is on the other side of Schengen. . Putin was successful for two decades, but Vučić and his camarilla will be wrong if they continue to follow his arrogance and their new socioeconomic status. Putin's defeat in Ukraine will also be his political collapse, and then the former Yugoslavia, the paradigm of the failed Soviet Union, will once again be one of the priorities before the need to redefine and thereby consolidate the EU's foreign and security policy. Whether in that process, every little Putin will become a nuisance or remain a scarecrow, that is not clear enough at this moment.