EU REACTION TO SERBIA-RUSSIA RELATIONS

Serbia has become an interesting arena for EU-Russian relations to develop, encounter and expose themselves, growing its significance since 2008 and remaining relevant to the present time. A neutral-land type of state, a winner takes it all type of game, an awkward discussion for EU foreign ministers and a pressure point for Russia when they need to use its leverage inside Europe. Serbia has become an interesting case study, since its situation has been described as unique by both Russia and the EU in multiple occasions (mostly due to the Kosovo question) and Serbia has acted, in the opinion of this author, as a clever maneuver who hasn't really compromised completely by pledging loyalty to one actor, but has been successful on its balancing act, which we will analyze on the present essay. We will start by analyzing the literature on the topic; due to the availability of research papers, we will only cover the Serbian affair from the 2000s to the Covid-19 outbreak. Secondly, we will reflect through foreign policy analysis to understand the rationality behind the actors’ actions, trying to develop a take that will help us understand the nature of this affair.

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Background and literature

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When we talk about the Serbian-Russia-EU affair we refer to the fact that, since 2008, there has been a balancing act from Serbia when it comes to its relationship with the EU and Russia (Vuksanovic, 2021). Serbia has been a topic of discussion with regards to the EU-Russia relations, since the country has encountered itself on opposite poles, as in many other occasions. The thing that makes Serbia a different case from the rest of the Balkans, and even from the rest of Eastern Europe, is the conditions that surround it and the outcome, since, on our opinion, no other European country has balanced its partnerships in such neutral matter as Serbia. Among academia we find a debate on various factors, but all of the authors we reviewed for this essay agree on one thing: It all started with Kosovo. In the late 2000s the European international scene was not focused on the Balkans at all, since the ENP was mainly focused on the Baltics and central-eastern Europe, the color revolutions were dragging attention to the Caucasus and Ukraine, and the eastern enlargement and the PCA were points of tension for both the EU and Russia, and a financial eurozone crisis was emerging. All of this resulted in a power-vacuum in the Balkans (Nelaeva & Semenov, 2016) (Vuksanovic, 2021). However, due to historical and cultural reasons, it is believed that Serbia felt this vacuum more than others, which resulted in a search for a strong partner to align with (Szpala, 2014). Then, we arrive to the Kosovo's independence declaration. Kosovo was a turning point in this affair, since the apparent rush of some EU leaders to recognize the declaration of Kosovo totally eclipsed those who didn’t (Petrovic, 2009). Germany, France and the United Kingdom did not only recognize Kosovo´s legitimacy, but also informally implied that no use of force should be made. This angered Serbia in a significant matter, according to Vuksanovic (2021): 

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“The role of the EU in Serbian foreign policy since 2008 became ‘minimal’, “because after 2008 and Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence there is a crisis in the EU and the EU’s declining presence in Serbia. There was still insistence on integration, and there were various stages. The integration process has commenced, but the EU’s influence on foreign and security policy has been minimal. It was greater in 2008, as opposed to after 2008.” 

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Plus, the eurozone crisis quickly emerged and turned the EU-Serbia relations into a diplomatic ice camp where silence and bad manners ruled the table, and, although, Serbia didn't break relations with the EU, since the Union was the main commercial partner and due to shared borders, Serbia even threatened to expel the ambassadors of those countries who recognize Kosovo but they avoided doing it so with the big EU countries, they only enforced this threat with neighboring states (Economides, 2015). In all this mess, this was where Russia found momentum and filled the power gap that the EU had left. Russia didn´t only reject Kosovo's independence, but supported Serbia politically and increased exports during the Kosovo crisis, becoming Serbia´s bigger exporter (Petrovic, 2009). Russia applied a discursive strategy in which the Kremlin blamed the west, particularly NATO, for the Georgian war and the Kosovo crisis, as we can read in Medvedev´s declaration on the recognition of Georgia's breakaway regions (Medvedev, 2008). It is interesting how Kosovo and South Ossetia were “similar” cases who received different reactions from Russia, since they supported the autonomy of two regions in Georgia but rejected the Kosovan one, which could be seemed as an incoherence, however, the main discursive excuse for this was the use of force, since Russia made clear that Serbia´s armed forces didn´t, and should never, interfere in the so-called autonomous regions.

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On another note, it is important to mention how the NATO interests in both states were a factor that pushed Russia´s response in the opposite direction (Petrovic, 2009) since the United States used its support to Kosovo to gain favor in the installment and preservation of their military base in Camp Bondsteel (1999) and had similar intentions with Georgia as stated in the 2008 Bucharest Summit. Russia supported Serbia in a way where they were also making a statement against NATO-enlargement, which resulted in favor of their ties with Serbia and a tension point with the EU (Larsen, 2020). Russia also landed energy sector deals with Serbia, and Gazprom´s acquisition of the Serbian company NIS and the beginning of several energy projects tied even more the influence that Russia already had in Serbian local policies (Szpala, 2014) and Russia took advantage of that. Soft-power tools were implemented to increase the perception of the Serbs about the Russians, security cooperation and military ties were closed, cultural events increased and even religious proximity became more evident, Serbs consolidated their favorable image of Russians and culturally this became very relevant. For this I want to exemplify by providing two cases: the first is relating historical discourse, since Serbia is one of the few countries in Europe that still commemorate the entry of the Red Army as the one and only liberation from fascism (Alimov &  Filipovic, 2018), which leads us to a public perception matter, something that we will develop forward. The second has to do with the religious element. Orthodoxy isn’t exclusively belonged to Serbs and Russians, but they share a strong tie that has resulted in important social feelings toward each other, the idea of “eastern brothers” has resulted in strong ethnic identification and the sacralization of national identity, which has been driven towards an idea of religious alliance which has deeper political implications than we could find among other churches. For example, it is believed that the Russian Patriarch Kirill successfully boycotted the visit of the Pope to Serbia (Barisic, 2016), which was a demonstration of how tied both churches are and how much power Russian orthodoxy still has inside Serbia. 

Russian involvement in Kosovo was not well received among the EU, who started deep investigations on the new energy deals among the two friends, with the justification of proving its compatibility with the Energy Community Treaty, with which Serbia already had obligations as part of the integration process (Petrovic, 2009). The EU also demanded alignment on its foreign policy towards Russia, however these demands were never satisfied, not even after the 2014 Crimea’s crisis. The EU was not able to reach a common declaration on Russian involvement in Serbia, since as a non-member it was sort-of free to allow this and it would have looked like European intervention if stronger actions were publicly made (Economides, 2015). From 2012 to 2014, things started to cool down, the normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo were mainly lead by the EU (the Brussels agreement) (Vuksanovic, 2021), and Serbia continued its accession process, although with a big elephant in the room, since a silent-recognition was implied to be a requirement for Serbia´s accession (Nelaeva & Semenov, 2016). This resulted in a not so high public support for the accession, which was the lowest among the Balkans during this period. There is also a believe that the accession process during these times was more pragmatically based, since Serbia never really abandoned its claim on Kosovo´s legitimacy, but it only accepted a certain level of normalization as a condition for its accession, with no trace of a value-based interest (Economides, 2015). Then Crimea happened.

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The Crimea crisis in 2014 was the doom of any attempt by Russia or the EU to develop a healthy partnership and a common friendly strategy regarding their neighbors (Cadier, 2014), after that, it was pure competition on who was getting the favor of whom, who was creating the biggest network and who was supporting the sanctions of whom.  The EU strongly requested Serbia to support the Union’s condemnation of the annexation and its support on sanctioning Russia, however, this was the period where Russia applied more pressure into Serbia, since a big machinery of soft power was already installed and deep commercial ties were in place. This was the first case in which we saw how “When Russia is in rivalry with the West, it becomes more interested in the Balkans” (Vuksanovic, 2021). Russia had already supported Serbia internationally, with multiple summits and events, also, Russia had used its veto power to support Serbia in the Security Council, not only during the Kosovo crisis, but also in other matters (see the SC resolution on Srebrenica massacre) (Alimov & Filipovic, 2018), then, when Crimea was a hot topic in the international organizations, Serbia aligned itself with Russia´s allies, or remained neutral on some occasions. Serbia didn't join the sanctions against Russia, since the ones that were implemented already were limiting the financial support that Russia was providing to the Serbian government (Vukmirović et, al. 2021), and even though it was not only the EU who was putting pressure, since the United States was also applying a lot of it, Serbia remained firm on its position, gaining even more Russian support (Alimov & Filipovic, 2018). The EU responded, as before, by placing Serbia and the Balkans in the non-priority list, meaning, the power vacuum was again in place. EU leverage seemed to be reduced, since the accession was becoming an ambiguous question after the Croatian accession, given that a feeling of fatigue was noted among commentators (Vuksanovic, 2021). In addition, the “europeanization” process was a disappointment, since certain local policies regarding individual liberties were incompatible with the rest of the EU and the change was not perceived to be close (Nelaeva & Semenov, 2016). On top of that, economic accession was an even more ambiguous question, since Serbia´s growth rates and unemployment questioned the validity of its accession until 2030 (Larsen, 2020), which meant that the EU leverage on Serbia, at least on the short run, was weak. 

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After Ukraine, the EU was not entirely absent from Serbia but it really didn't turn the Serbian balancing act in its favor. The most relevant policy was the “Berlin process”, initiated by chancellor Angela Merkel, which aimed to strengthen Germany’s position in the Balkans (Vuksanovic, 2021). EU investment continued, mainly in the form of labor-intensive projects, which resulted in great macroeconomic results, but didn’t turn into the satisfaction of the Serbian government, who has preferred direct investment and diversification of its economy (Vukmirović, 2021). Meanwhile, Russia managed to condition its public investment with their involvement in the serbian economy in the form of financial assessment, meaning, they have provided funding to certain serbian projects and this funding has been a subject of leverage for the russians when it comes to Serbian choices, which they seemed to have taken advantage of the inefficiency of the Serbian authorities in economic affairs. Russia has also provided military and intelligence cooperation, taking full advantage of its position. The Russian government was involved in local politics in an unprecedented way (Samokhvalov, 2019). After Ukraine, Serbia did not only side with Russia, but also started a new partnership with China, adding the country to its “4 pillars of foreign policy” (Larsen, 2020), next to the EU, Russia and the United States of America. The power vacuum was being filled, the Serbs accepted investment from all sides and remained neutral in most of the foreign policy crisis, at least till the 2020. Even with the Berlin process, the Balkans were once again placed in the non-priority list when the new EU crisis emerged, the migration crisis and Brexit, which didn't really help the accession process and Serbia remained with its balancing act as before. In 2018 the weather was calmer, similar to 2012. After the Berlin process, a new plan was published by the EU which suggested that Serbia could enter the EU in 2025, however, no real process was executed (Vuksanovic, 2021). After 2018, Russia turned to a more pragmatic method of engaging with Balkan countries and they have answered the same way, being more assertive and direct about their interests. Serbia knows its help on Kosovo depends on Russian support and the fact that the EU is failing as mediators helps Russia to be more politically present in Serbian´s foreign policy (Samokhvalov, 2019). In 2017 a new Serbian positioning took place, after they expelled the Ukrainian ambassador due to his declarations on how Russia was “using Serbia” to damage Europe (Zivanovic, 2017). This resulted in tensions between Serbia and Ukraine, in which obviously Russia took the Serbian side, but no response from the EU was visible. In 2019, French president Macron vetoed the beginning of accession conversations with Albania and North Macedonia, which made the notion of accession fatigue even bigger (Vuksanovic, 2021), besides, Kosovo has been on the eye since they have not complied with their compromises from the Brussels agreement, which has been an annoyance for the EU. In 2020 there was no significant chapter in the accession story of Serbia, which made commentators believe that the EU leverage is becoming smaller every year.

Finally, we need to comment on the COVID-19 pandemic, since the Serbian response showed a more contemporary behavior of this triangle of relations. Even though the EU launched the biggest financial support for Serbia, the public believes that Russia was the one who helped them the most, and even though they did send a package of medical equipment, medicines and financial aid, their help was smaller than the EU one and even the Chinese, which was the country that the Serbian government stated to be their biggest aiders (Šantić & Antić, 2020). The resentment against the EU could be traced to the fact that the EU banned the export of medical equipment outside its members, which affected Serbia more than others, and the Russian help, although not so big, had bigger significance, placing the Russians as their heroes, and the Europeans as non-friends. 

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The Balancing act, is it effective?

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Among the literature we have discussed, two positions prevailed, the one against Serbian siding with the Russians, arguing that this only interferes with the Serbian accession to the EU and its gaining a “less significant” alliance with the Russians, and the one in favor of the Serbian balancing act, which mainly states that Serbia isn't really siding with anyone, but is instead keeping an open table where its 4 pillars have provided money, power and culture for a relatively small price, assuming that the accession process was going to be this long since the beginning. The fact is that Serbia is still years away from its accession, and even though every scholar reviewed seems to agree on the fact that Serbia's accession should be the ultimate goal, not everyone agrees on the when and the how. Russia hasn't really hindered the accession, they officially are not against it (contrary to its accession to NATO) and it seems like they are respecting Serbia´s will to become an EU member (Szpala, 2014), however, of course certain conditions have been expressed, such as the need for the respect of the current energy deals. Meanwhile, Serbia has been flirting with other partners outside Europe that have been generous with their investments, such as China, and we can expect Serbia to keep this balancing act in the future, since the accession still seems far away (Larsen, 2020). Russia, on the other hand, hasn’t really paid a high price for its support to Serbia and has gained a door to European politics, since Serbia will remain a relevant actor inside the Balkans with big leverage on geopolitical issues (Nelaeva & Semenov, 2016). Russia's soft power and business affairs have been more than successful in securing its position in Serbian politics, becoming a strong partner with gatekeepers who have a high debt and dependency on the Russian government. Gatekeepers is an element of the gray zone theory applied by Nelaeva & Semenov (2016) to explain how Serbia's slow process towards democracy could explain why Russia has been so effective dealing with them, since its constant relations with the serbian gatekeepers have secured a position of power of those who find themselves aligned with the non-western actors, which also explains the rise of China as an important actor. Although this essay wasn't meant to go deep inside party-politics in Serbia, there is evidence of how the dominant party has deep ties with Russian politics and it seemed to have the Russian support to succeed in local elections (see Vuksanovic, 2021, chapter IV), also, we are excluding an unexplored topic by academia, but which is trendy among international journalists: the Serbian organized delinquency, which has been connected to Russian crime organizations (See the Ukrainian ambassador interview for BIRN, 2017). All these factors, international and local, build the image of the Serbian balancing act, in which it seems that Europe needs urgently to take it more seriously, before Russia starts gaining leverage on more relevant issues, such as the accession conclusion. 

Conclusion

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The Serbian-Russian-EU relations, since before Kosovo till the Covid-19 pandemic have been interesting, to say at least, we identified two inflexion points that have gain leverage on Russia in favor to gain Serbian support and its access to Europe, the Kosovo declaration of independence in 2008 and the Crimean annexation of 2014. Leverage has been the key word for us, since Russian support to Serbia relating Kosovo was the root that changed everything, where Serbia sided with Russia and the EU significantly decreased its influence in Serbia, even with their leverage with the accession process. Serbia retributed Russian support by supporting the Kremlin politically, especially in the 2014 Crimean crisis, however, this was not a simple retribution that closed a debt and finished a story, this was the demonstration of how strong was the relationship that they have, and, how Russia was taking advantage of its position in Serbia to pressure the EU when the actors found themselves in geopolitical disputes. We conclude that the Russian-EU relations will keep finding a game field in Serbia, gaining leverage and applying pressure when they find it favorable, meanwhile, Serbia will keep siding with the highest bitter, but mainly the highest bitter that can pay now, not in 10 years and if “everything goes according to the process” (see Macron´s veto on accession conversations in 2019).

By Luis Santaella

Citations

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Barisic, Srdjan. “The Role of the Serbian and Russian Orthodox Churches in Shaping Governmental Policies.” Biserko, Sonja (ed.), The Warp of the Serbian Identity, Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia (2016): n. pag. Print.

Cadier, D. “Eastern partnership vs Eurasian Union? The EU–Russia competition in the shared neighbourhood and the Ukraine crisis”. Global Policy (2014), 5, 76-85. 

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Medvedev, Dmitry. Why I had to recognize Georgia’s breakaway regions. Financial Times. 26 August 2008.

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Vukmirović, Valentina, Milica Kostić-Stanković, Dejana Pavlović, Jovo Ateljević, Dragan Bjelica, Milenko Radonić, and Dejan Sekulić. “Foreign Direct Investments’ Impact on Economic Growth in Serbia.” Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies 23, no. 1 (2021): 122–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/19448953.2020.1818028.

Vuksanovic, Vuk. “Systemic pressures, party politics and foreign policy: Serbia between Russia and the West, 2008-2020”. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (2021).

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Photo: A mural in Belgrade depicts Russian President Vladimir Putin and a text reading “Kosovo is Serbia” December 2nd 2022. Source: Getty Images, Pierre Crom.