While all eyes are on Ukraine, Serbia, supported by Russia, is causing new chaos in the Balkans. By pushing the region to the brink of collapse and sparking ethnic conflicts, the Kremlin hopes to undermine NATO and reestablish Russia as a power broker in the region.
The growing conflict between Kosovo and Serbia threatens to turn into a new crisis in Europe. In May, clashes staged by ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo injured thirty members of NATO peacekeeping forces, and the escalation has continued since then.
Serbia and Russia have a penchant for dates and historical myths, and this Wednesday will be another opportunity that Moscow and Belgrade will find hard to resist to add more fuel to the fire in the region. June 28 commemorates the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, an event deeply rooted in Serbian history.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that the Kosovo-Serbia crisis is evolving “towards an armed conflict”. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that “a big explosion is brewing in the center of Europe.” While it is difficult to predict whether the situation in Kosovo will escalate to the level of armed conflict, Russia and Serbia will likely conduct information operations to exacerbate ethnic tensions in the region on June 28.
It is high time for the West to return to the scenario of the Serbian and Russian matches and use Wednesday’s information space to put them on the defensive.
The conflict has potential for escalation. Last week, US President Biden announced that the situation posed “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stressed that NATO has “increased our presence and will continue to take all necessary measures to ensure a safe and secure environment and freedom of movement for all communities in Kosovo.”
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To ease the situation, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell arranged a meeting between the leaders of the two countries last Thursday (June 22), but noted on Twitter that the meeting did not yield much progress and that the situation in northern Kosovo remained “very alarming”.
The crux of the matter lies in how Russia and Serbia would benefit from the escalation in Kosovo. For the first, Putin’s efforts to destabilize the Balkans are part of his broader regional strategy aimed at establishing Russia as a global power broker while weakening NATO’s credibility and diverting attention from the West of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
On the other hand, Vučić hopes to derive more immediate strategic interests from Russia’s interference, presenting himself as a source of stability amid regional chaos, escalating and defusing conflicts with Kosovo as a currency. Western exchange. This strategy, aimed at retaining power, by undermining pro-Western Serbian opposition and promoting far-right nationalists, while appearing moderate to the West. The Kosovo crisis is also helping to distract from its own domestic political problems.
There is no other holiday more important for Serbia than June 28, when the Battle of Kosovo took place in 1389 between the armies of Serbia and the Ottoman Empire at Kosovo Polje. More than six centuries have passed since this event, but this holiday, called Vidovdan, has significant cultural and historical importance in Serbian history and is considered a symbol of sacrifice and bravery.
If history is any indication, it is worth remembering that on June 28, 1989, then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic gave a speech at Gazimestan, a memorial site dedicated to fallen Serbian soldiers. This was before the intense ethnic tensions that resulted in the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The narrative surrounding Kosovo was essential to Milosevic’s political survival, as he shaped his nationalist agenda based on this myth. Milosevic remarked: “Six centuries later, we face new battles, requiring the same determination, courage and sacrifices once seen in Kosovo, but now in our fight for societal prosperity and civilization of the 21st century. This struggle requires a different kind of courage and heroism, which is essential to any significant and far-reaching success.
Last week, Vučić spoke about Vidovdan and warned of difficult times for the Serbs, stressing that “things are almost over.”
In response, the West should resort to offensive information operations using social media and local media platforms to reach far-right Serbian nationalists who view Kosovo as the heart of their homeland.
Instead of trying to sell far-right Serbian stories about Western democracies and persuading them to accept Kosovo’s independence, these operations should exploit Serbian nationalism to highlight Moscow’s duplicity and portray Russia as an imperial power that strategically exploits Kosovo for its own geopolitical interest. As Russia pledges support to Serbia, Western information operations are expected to portray Moscow as an unreliable partner by reminding Serbs of Russia’s failure to help its ally Armenia, a member of the CSTO, during last year’s clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Russia has pledged support to Serbia, but far-right Serbs may not believe that Russia’s military capability is currently limited. Instead, effective information operations should remind Serbs that Russia once joined the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, but abandoned it in 2003. The West should exploit this episode as a case study of the Russian government throwing its Slavic brothers under tutelage. bus, thus emphasizing to Serbian nationalists: “Where was Russia in 1999 to protect its Slavic NATO brothers?
Why stop there? Instead of reproducing the Russian narrative of the “Battle of Kosovo,” the West should create a new narrative for June 28. Namely, on this day, Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), abandoned Stalin when Yugoslavia was considered the most important country. reliable Soviet ally until 1948.
In April 1945, Tito concluded the Soviet-Yugoslav Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance, making Yugoslavia an ally of the Soviet Union. After numerous ideological and strategic disagreements, Stalin presented the Yugoslav leaders as “anti-Soviet” and “anti-Marxist-Leninist.” In response, Tito launched purges against Stalin loyalists in Yugoslavia, leading to the geopolitical reorientation of Yugoslavia within Eastern Europe. The final affirmation of the Tito-Stalin split occurred on June 28, 1948, when the Soviet Cominform issued a resolution accusing the KPJ of anti-Soviet policies and deviating from the Marxist-Leninist line.
By leveraging Serbs’ affinity for bold leaders, the West should portray Vučić as less tenacious than Tito by employing humor and amplifying Tito’s response to Stalin after he attempted to assassinate Tito in 22 times: “Stop sending people to kill me. We have already captured five, one with a bomb and another with a rifle… If you don’t stop sending killers, I will send one to Moscow, and I will not send a second. .”
Along the same lines, the Serbian president seeks to emulate Tito’s East-West coverage policy, a trait Washington should put to the test. Given Vučić’s overall hold on the Serbian media landscape, the West should leverage this consolidated authority to counter Russian influence in the Balkans.
Moscow is using its information operations to sow chaos in Kosovo and show that NATO and the West are nothing more than paper tigers. It is high time for the West to show that the Russian “Slavic Brotherhood” is nothing more than a myth in the Balkans.
Dr. Ivana Stradner focuses on information security in Russia and Russian influence in international organizations. She is an advisor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where her work focuses on Russia’s security strategies and military doctrines related to information operations. She has worked as a visiting scholar at Harvard University and as a lecturer at various universities, including the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.
The opinions expressed in this opinion article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Kyiv Post.
