Is Serbia planning to destabilize or even attack with military force the neighboring countries of Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina? Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani and her Bosnian counterpart Denis Becirovic recently warned of the danger of such a scenario.
In a televised interview in September, Osmani said there was hope for the Western Balkans to join the EU and NATO, "but this would require treating Serbia for what it is: a satellite state of Russia that is deepening its military, economic and political cooperation with it".
Becirović's warning about Serbia's territorial ambitions sounded even more urgent: "I would like to warn the world community that the leadership of the Republic of Serbia is once again threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Belgrade is arming itself
For years, Belgrade has been massively rearming its army with modern weapons systems: French fighter jets and Russian combat helicopters have been purchased, which Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic called "flying tanks". Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Belgrade secured Chinese air defense systems. There are also reports that Serbia has bought thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles from Iran - like those that Russia uses almost daily against Ukrainian cities.
Even in 2021, the British "Economist" wrote that Belgrade scares its neighbors with its arms purchases. And in 2022, the Swedish institute SIPRI noted that Belgrade's defense budget of 1.3 billion euros was ten times larger than that of Kosovo.
The arsenal of battle tanks well illustrates Serbia's military superiority: the country has around 250 such combat vehicles, more than all the other former Yugoslav republics combined. (For comparison: the German army has 295 tanks.) In second place is Croatia with 75, followed by Bosnia with 45 and North Macedonia with 31. Montenegro and Kosovo have no tanks at all.
This is probably one of the reasons why Kosovo's small, nascent armed forces were equipped with Turkish "Bayraktar" drones. last year, and this year with 250 American Javelin anti-tank missiles.
The "Serbian World" project
The question arises why Belgrade has been accumulating a huge arsenal of weapons for years without the neighboring countries posing any threat to Serbia. Is President Vučić planning to attack neighboring countries, as warnings are being heard from Kosovo?
The behavior of the Serbian leadership feeds such concerns: Belgrade is promoting the "Serbian World" project, which appears to be a scale model of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic's more ambitious plan for a "Greater Serbia". - and which met with a positive response among the Serbs in Kosovo and Bosnia.
In order to realize his nationalist goal for Serbia - the unification of all Serb-populated areas of the former Yugoslavia, in the 1990s Milosevic provoked four wars in which more than 130,000 people died.
Several high-ranking members of the Serbian government served under Milosevic, including President Aleksandar Vucic and Interior Minister Ivica Dacic, who headed Milosevic's propaganda apparatus.
At the beginning of June 2024, Vucic presided over the so-called "All-Serbian Assembly" in Belgrade. with representatives of the Serbs from all parts of the former Yugoslavia - a strategic meeting at which the so-called "All-Serbian Declaration" in practice, the plan for the implementation of the "Serbian World" was formulated. In it, Kosovo is described as part of Serbia, and Republika Srpska - the Serb-dominated part of Bosnia and Herzegovina - is defined as a "national interest of Serbia".
A new war in the Balkans?
None of the neighboring countries, which are apparently the object of Belgrade's territorial ambitions, have armed forces prepared for war. Therefore, without the protection of the two Western peacekeeping missions - NATO in Kosovo (KFOR) and the EU in Bosnia (EUFOR/Althea) - they would be easy prey for Belgrade.
In recent years, several Serbian troop buildups along the border with Kosovo and an attack by a Serbian paramilitary unit on Kosovo security forces have sparked unrest and unrest. Because precisely similar events marked the beginning of the war in Croatia in 1991, and a year later the war in Bosnia.
As the US and NATO reacted quickly and sharply to these incidents, Belgrade nevertheless backed down. In August 2024, Washington intervened again, sending CIA Director William Burns to Bosnia and Herzegovina to cool the separatist passions of Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, who had taken steps to declare independence for Republika Srpska.
Politicians in Sarajevo are preparing for a scenario in which Republika Srpska will seek to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina. If this escalates into an armed conflict, it is very likely that Belgrade will send tanks to the aid of the Bosnian Serbs.
Therefore, a new war in the Balkans is not excluded. And with the return of Donald Trump to the White House, it is not very clear how the superpower USA will react in such a case. Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner has serious business interests in Serbia.