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The Western Balkans appear to be playing an increasingly important role in Russia's plans. Through its leverage in the region, Moscow is able to generate enough problems that require the attention of the West and diminish its ability to manage crises elsewhere - for example in the former Soviet Union.
The 1990s: Post-Soviet Russia loses first Western confrontation in Western Balkans
Imagine the map of the world as a chessboard where the white pieces are the pro-democratic powers and the black ones the autocratic ones. The next step is to observe how the “blacks” build their offensive to gain control over as large an area of the board as possible.
The beginning of 2022 finds us in a position marked by many “openings” made in the past years from Asia to Europe .
The Russians created such an “opening” in the Western Balkans through a well-established network of state and non-governmental pawns. And they have been doing so since the 1990s, immediately after the dismantling of former Yugoslavia, when Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro or North Macedonia were of no strategic interest - be it economic or political – to Westerners. To Russia, that of Vladimir Putin’s in particular, the region is like the bishop whose long moves across the board can show Western chancellors what might happen in their own backyard if Europeans and Americans meddle in that of Moscow’s, meaning Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and other such countries.
Russia has been insinuating itself in the region since the 1990s amid secession wars that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia, by getting involved in the management of conflicts. Let's just remember that in 1992, Russia voted at the United Nations to impose an economic embargo on Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia. Or that, in 1994, it participated alongside the United States, France, Germany and the United Kingdom in setting up the Contact Group managing the crises triggered by the wars in former Yugoslavia. Let us also not forget that Russian soldiers were part of the Bosnia and Kosovo Peacekeeping Force. (SFOR and KFOR)
In other words, in the 1990s, Russia, which was relying more on diplomatic means and its residual military power, sought to turn this presence into political capital that would assign it the role of pillar of power in the region.
However, the year 1999 was crucial for Russia's relationship with the Western Balkans. This is the year of the Rambouillet Peace Conference, aimed to end the conflict in Kosovo under NATO mediation. The draft peace agreement mainly provided for Kosovo to be administered by NATO, as an autonomous province within Yugoslavia, a NATO law enforcement force and the right of NATO troops to cross into Yugoslav territory, including Kosovo. The project was accepted by Albanians in Kosovo, the United States and the United Kingdom, but was rejected by Slobodan Milosevic and his Russian allies. Following the failure in Rambouillet, the Serbs left the negotiations table, and the Allies launched Operation Allied Force, airstrikes aimed at stopping Serbian military action and retaliation in Kosovo, withdrawing Serbian forces from the province and, last but not least, obtaining credible assurances from the Milosevic regime that it was willing to create a political framework for the future of Kosovo on the basis of the Rambouillet Agreement. That was in March 1999. Three months later, after negotiations involving the Russians, Milosevic surrendered and accepted NATO’s terms. It was the first indirect confrontation of the Allies with the Russians, which the latter lost.
Putin's era: oligarchs start buying the Western Balkans
It would seem that Vladimir Putin, who would become Prime Minister of the Russian Federation no sooner than August 1999, had nothing to do with this episode. The current Kremlin leader took over the issue of the Western Balkans from where his predecessors failed. Using three crucial instruments - cooperation, coercion and subversive actions - Moscow started, through its “pawns”, to “tie” to itself the small former Yugoslav republics through strategic acquisitions. And the offensive began in 2003 when the Russian giant Lukoil bought nearly 80 percent of the shares of the Serbian oil company Beopetrol. Two years later, Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch, bought the Zarubezneft aluminum factory in Montenegro. Deripaska's investment did not stop there - he got to control both refineries in Bosnia and Herzegovina, gain monopoly on the market for petroleum products and the list goes on.
Russia is not the main trading partner or investor in the Western Balkans, but in the last 22 years Moscow has made significant acquisitions in strategic sectors such as energy, heavy industry, mining and even banking. Profits are limited, sometimes completely lacking (see Bosnia), which makes the purpose of these investments clear even to the unsuspecting.
Behind this economic expansion in the Western Balkans, Russia has in fact built a strategic geopolitical shield. In 2012, Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations secured its presence at the Serbo-Russian Humanitarian Center in Nis through an agreement with the Belgrade executive. The mentioned ministry also had paramilitary units. The Nis Center is one with many suspicions hovering about it concerning intelligence collection in the area. Perhaps this is just one of the points of dissemination of Russian destabilization plans in the Western Balkans. In recent years, through the Kremlin court politicians such as the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, the failure to reform Bosnia has resulted in increasingly articulated separatist movements. The Serb entity Republika Srpska has already taken steps to prepare for the break-up from Bosnia and, perhaps, annexation to Serbia. For Moscow, it was very easy to prepare the ground ahead of time, right after the Dayton Accords establishing the international monitoring that the Russians are challenging. It is the poorest, most corrupt country, which, although it has Euro-Atlantic aspirations, fails to build a state, despite the money coming from the West, despite the agreements signed, despite the popular will. We are no longer talking about a political crisis in Bosnia. It's a rapidly deteriorating security crisis. If Bosnian Serbs proclaim the independence of Republika Srpska at the borders of two NATO member states, Croatia and Montenegro, a pole of insecurity will be created right in the heart of the Western Balkans. There is also the alternative of a Croatian-Muslim Federation, exactly as it is now, dysfunctional, in which apparently difficult to control conflicts can break out at any time. That's what the Kremlin wanted to achieve, and it did.
Russia’s Game: Failure in Montenegro, maneuvering space in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia
What Russia has failed to do in the Western Balkans is to seize Montenegro . 9 years ago, Moscow called on the Montenegrin government to approve its regular access to the Adriatic seaports of Bar and Kotor, a request which Podgorica refused as it was in the process of joining NATO, which it completed in 2017.
From 2013 to 2015, Russia tried through massive disinformation campaigns to prevent the integration of that country in the space of democratic values, and getting closer to the West. In December 2015, when Podgorica announced it had accepted the Allies’ invitation to join NATO, Russia changed its strategy. Fueling political and ethnic conflicts in the area, it tried to destabilize the small former Yugoslav republic, with the ultimate goal of triggering a change of power in Podgorica, into one close to Moscow, that would block Montenegro's rapprochement with the West. The pro-Western fiber of the Montenegrins led to the separation, in 2006, from Serbia, Russia’s overt ally in the former Yugoslav space, and since then Montenegro's Euro-Atlantic course has been clear.
One year before Montenegro joined NATO, on the very day of the October 2016 parliamentary elections, Podgorica authorities thwarted a coup attempt. The plan included the assassination of the pro-Western Prime Minister Milo Djukanovich, the siege of parliament and the coming of a pro-Russian government that would block accession to NATO. There is no direct evidence that Russia had any part in it, the Montenegrin chief prosecutor said at the time. Two years later, a court in Podgorica sentenced 14 people for involvement in the October 2016 plot. Among them were two Russians suspected of being spies. In fact, the two were tried in absentia, as they were most likely in Russia. Prosecutors did not directly accuse them of working for Moscow, but the case revealed possible evidence of an operation by the Russian military intelligence agency, GRU.
While Montenegro is a pawn that Russia seems to have already lost, the same cannot be said of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Kosovo. It's a different kind of “frozen conflict” that Moscow will “warm up” when it needs to “burn” the hand of Europeans and Americans to get something else.
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