A Ukrainian citizen who arrived in Serbia with several young men and women from Croatia during the current protests was previously detained in Belgrade for filming military facilities, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said.
Serbian media reported earlier that on December 27, eight young Croats and one Ukrainian - Alexey Chumakov - entered Serbian territory from Croatia. They explained to border guards that they came before December 30 for tourist purposes, met with protesters in Belgrade and visited the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, which was under blockade. According to a number of Serbian media outlets, the visitors are agents of the Croatian Security and Intelligence Agency.
"This Ukrainian was detained in Belgrade in 2022 because he and two other Ukrainian citizens were filming Serbia's most important defense infrastructure with a drone. When they were detained, he was in custody for some time, but I have never seen such pressure from foreign ambassadors to release him“, Vucic said on TV Pink on Monday night.
"This is not about naive children – "the detainees committed crimes against the security of Serbia," Vucic believes.
According to him, the unrest during the protests in November over the death of 15 people in the collapse of a railway station in the city of Novi Sad was caused by "some foreign intelligence services", and the tragedy was just a pretext.
Vucic said in December that the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SPP) would not support the foreign agents bill proposed by the SPP's coalition partner, Aleksandar Vulin's Movement of Socialists, "for a number of reasons".
At the same time, according to Vucic, 426 million euros have been invested in the overthrow of the current Serbian government from abroad in four years in the media, various associations, parties and organizations.
The Serbian president noted on December 3 that the sponsor of the "color revolutions" in different countries around the world it is always the same, and the victims are the people, and pointed out the similarities between the current protests in Serbia and North Macedonia in 2016 and the abuse of children during the riots in Georgia.
He assured that "this will not happen in Serbia" and that the state is "much stronger than individual centers of power think", and the Serbian authorities are democratically oriented enough to tolerate the stupidity of the protesters until the last moment.