The next war?

In late September 2023, the Serbian army massed on the border with Kosovo following a shootout between Kosovan police and around 30 armed ethnic Serbs. The militants had attacked three police units in a carefully staged operation before taking refuge in a nearby monastery, leaving one officer and three gunmen dead. Ethno-nationalist politicians in both countries talked up the possibility of conflict; only pressure from Biden’s White House saw the Serbian army reluctantly withdraw.

In other words, a second shooting war on European soil very nearly started – and nobody in the UK noticed. The non-EU states of the Balkan peninsula – the ex-Yugoslav republics of Serbia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo and North Macedonia, alongside Albania and Moldova to the east – are regularly ignored in the British geopolitical discourse, dismissed as far away and unimportant. Even the Balkan EU members – Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Croatia and Slovenia –are seen as little more than tourist destinations. This is a dangerous and misguided way to view the region.

One of the lessons that the Labour government should have learnt from Russia’s invasion is to pay attention to simmering trouble-spots – as we should have done with Ukraine between 2014 and 2022. Most of the main geopolitical challenges facing the United Kingdom are playing out in the Balkans, and have been for at least a decade. Russian misinformation is widespread, as is election meddling, and it is the most likely location for another Ukraine-like conflict to break out. Meanwhile, organised crime finds the Western Balkans – a region entirely surrounded by EU states, where the rule-of-law is piecemeal, multi-state coordination of law enforcement almost non-existent, weapons leftover from the wars of the 90scommonplace and deprivation rife – the perfect staging post for their activities in western Europe, whether drug running, people smuggling, modern slavery or corruption. The Western Balkan route for migrants and refugees is at least comparable in scale to those crossing the Mediterranean sea in boats, but far less publicly discussed. Two-thirds of the regions power still comes from burning lignite coal, and many of the power plants there are over forty years old, undermining European efforts to combat climate change.

On every one of these issues western European nations, including Britain, are failing to step up, even where straightforward self-interest suggests they should. The most pressing of those challenges is Russia’s attempt to upend the global order in Europe, which is very visible in the Balkans.

Russia’s influence in the region is large, and dangerous, particularly in Serbia. Russia sees Serbia as a ‘sister-culture’ in the same way it does Ukraine. It was in defence of Serbs that Russia intervened to begin the first world war, and this has not been forgotten in either country. Serbian media overwhelmingly portrays the Ukrainian conflict through the Kremlin’s lens and Serbia refuses to participate in the global sanctions against Russia. Serbia’s ethno-nationalist president, Aleksandar Vuˇci´c, leads a regime characterised by the same democratic backsliding and admiration for Putin seen in Hungary and more recently Slovakia.

The sister-culture perspective is sometimes lost in discussion of Russian views of what they term their blizhneye zarubezhye, usually translated as ‘near-abroad’. In short, Putin’s internal population control rests on the contention that a western-style liberal democracy wouldn’t work in the Russian cultural world. If a culture which ordinary Russians deem to be close to theirs – Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Serbia, Belarus – could successfully transition into such a liberal democracy, it could be held up as an example to challenge Putin at home. This helps explain why the Russians intervened in Ukraine and Georgia after the Bucharest Declaration in April 2008 put them on the path to NATO membership; the Kremlin had been relatively sanguine about the Baltic states joining four years earlier. More recently, beyond a few sound and fury statements, Russia has not made too much of Sweden and Finland’s accessions.

Russia also continues to support Belgrade on its stance towards Kosovo. This is partly because the west’s recognition of Kosovan independence in 2008 is still held up by the Kremlin both as justification for its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine and as an example of the west’s hypocrisy –which, from the perspective of the global south, is an accusation that strikes home. Stoking tensions between Serbia and Kosovo has the potential to both tie down NATO forces and attention and to expose the alliance as a paper tiger unable to keep the peace in Europe. That is attractive to the Kremlin.

Russian malignity spreads further through the region than Serbia. A probably Russian-inspired and assisted coup in Montenegro – perhaps a last-ditch attempt to prevent the country joining NATO – was foiled in 2016. The cancellation and re-running of the recent elections in Romania following Russian influence operations is a rare story from the Balkans that made it into western headlines. Russian backed commentators are making hay in North Macedonia and Albania about the decision by France, Denmark and the Netherlands to veto their accession to EU membership in 2019. And it is Moldova – a former Soviet republic, with a frozen conflict in Transnistria involving Russian soldiers on its internationally recognised territory – that is the most likely Kremlin target after Ukraine (rather than the Baltics or Poland, which benefit from the protection of EU and NATO membership).

Meanwhile, the EU has taken its eye off the ball in Bosnia and Kosovo, reducing western military presence in both states and ignoring both the Russian-supported (though not Russian-created) rise in ethnonationalist rhetoric in Serb-majority areas and the repressive actions of both governments towards those Serbian minorities. Bosnian Croat leaders are also destabilising the country over electoral reforms. In North Macedonia, the prime minister is accused of interfering in the independence of the judiciary, threatening to incite street protests unless five senior judges resign.

But these clouds are not without silver linings. Serbia is not a Russian vassal, however close their historical ties. It has condemned the invasion of Ukraine repeatedly at the UN and in public statements. Vuˇci´c plays a careful balancing game, and has so far successfully played Russia and the EU off against each other, benefitting from both EU accession development funding and cheap Russian oil and gas. In areas other than sanctions and normalising relations with Kosovo, Serbia is making progress on there forms needed to join the EU, unlike, say, Turkey. Many ordinary Serbs are attracted to the EU and the western model. Student-led protests against corruption, which followed the deadly collapse of a poorly built railway station canopy in Novi Sad, have been well-organised, long-lasting and effective, invoking the memory of the2002 overthrow of Slobodan Miloševi´c (in whose government Vuˇci´c served as minister of information).

Meanwhile, when Ukraine cut off the flow of Russian oil and gas over its territory, the Moldovan government was able to find alternatives; the separatists in Transnistria were not. This has given Dorin Recean, the pro-EU prime minister, unexpected leverage, especially after the incumbent president, Maia Sandu, won re-election against her pro-Russian challenger Alexandr Stoianoglo. Over the border, Russian election-meddling in Romania has played out visibly in public – making people there more aware of misinformation efforts and helping Romanian democracy survive. Following the 2018 resolution of its naming dispute with Greece, North Macedonia has moved much closer to the EU in recent years, as has Albania. Britain needs to play its part in encouraging these pro-Western actors. Perhaps the key lesson for Labour in foreign affairs is that we need to act carefully yet decisively as revanchist forces attempt to undermine and rewrite the global international order, led by Russia’s violent actions in Europe. Whilst Ukraine is the most obvious place this process is happening, the Balkans may well be next. Britain, and the rest of Europe, needs to wake up and pay attention.

Image Credit: Konstantin Novakovic via creative commons