Thewesternbalkans
In June 2024 Financial Times (FT) revealed that Serbia has exported to Ukraine ammunitions for about Euro 800 million although it is one of only two European countries not to join western sanctions against Russia.
Following the publication of FT, Serbia’s ammunition export have come to Ukraine via third countries. President Aleksandar Vučić presented the situation as a business opportunity, insisting he would not take sides in the war. He added: “We cannot export to Ukraine or to Russia, but we have had many contracts with Americans, Spaniards, Czechs, others. What they do with that in the end is their job”.
“This is a part of our economic revival and important for us. Yes, we do export our ammunition. My job is to secure the fact that we deal legally with our ammunition, that we sell it. I need to take care of my people, and that’s it. That’s all I can say. We have friends in Kyiv and in Moscow. These are our Slav brothers.” he said in an interview. Vučić said also that Serbia has a golden opportunity as its arms were cheaper than in the west, adding that the scale of Serbia’s overall ammunition exports could increase.
Serbia’s participation in the ammunition flow to Ukraine is sufficiently veiled that official data do not reflect it. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which monitors support for Ukraine, has not tracked Serbian activities directly and has not encountered systematic evidence of Serbian contributions.
On the other side, Serbian finance minister Siniša Mali said for the media that the defence industry, which employs 20,000 people in the country of 7 million people, could expand rapidly.
FT also insisted that Europe and the US have worked for years to distance Vučić from Putin, using all possible tools, including the US ambassador Christopher Hill, who arrived in Belgrade a month after the full-scale invasion and he has succeeded. Vučić has not met, nor even called Putin for last the two years. For the west, seeking support for Ukraine has become more important than pushing Serbia’s nationalist leader on democratic reforms. It is clear that the Serbian President does not want to recognise this, while in fact Serbia has offered massive aid to Ukraine.
Moscow prefers to ignore occasional backsliding by its ‘Serbian friends’ as it sees the relationship with Belgrade as crucial to sustaining the Russian influence in the Balkans.
The FT’s revelation that Serbia has indirectly provided Ukraine with armaments worth 800 million euros was a double surprise.
Not only had Europe’s most pro-Russian country, which refuses to join any sanctions against Moscow, but the Kremlin had ignored the matter.
“Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has sacrificed old alliances and partnerships for the sake of military victory over Kyiv. Russia abandoned its ally Armenia to face Azerbaijan rather than distract forces from the Ukrainian front. Its longstanding partnership with Israel was scrapped in exchange for Iranian drones. South Korea dragged its feet on joining anti-Russian sanctions – but Moscow sacrificed that good relationship in a heartbeat, opting for ammunition from North Korea instead” insisted FT.
The FT’s analysis continues with some conclusions: Belgrade has far less to offer Moscow than South Korea or Israel did, while its contribution to Ukraine’s war effort has turned out to be quite significant. To be sure, Serbia’s arms deliveries were commercial and done indirectly through NATO states, but in terms of sheer value, they amount to greater assistance than that provided by any of the three Baltic states or by such outspoken supporters of Kyiv as Spain or Croatia.
Serbian shells are directly undermining Russia’s efforts to exhaust Ukraine’s stockpiles and killing Russian soldiers. Vucic himself confirmed the scale of the supplies while nonchalantly stating that the end user’s identity was not his concern – as if Czechia, for example, might be buying shells right now for anyone other than Ukraine.
Even then, Russia did not react. Asked about the matter, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov muttered about discussing the issue with “our Serbian friends”. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova didn’t even mention it in her regular diatribes against Russia’s real and imaginary enemies.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko also kept silent, in public at least, about the arms to Ukraine issue during his visit to Belgrade on July 1-2. The Russian embassy in Belgrade even made an effort to refute media speculation that any controversies had arisen during Grushko’s meeting with Serbian officials.
Moscow was not so dumbfounded by the news that it didn’t know how to react. Serbia’s arms deliveries to Ukraine have been an open secret at least since early 2023, when the first leaks were published. Moscow then promised to look into the matter, yet continues to this day to praise Vucic as a dear friend and reliable partner.
Russia’s uncharacteristic restraint is the result of the way Vucic manages Serbia’s relations with Russia.
Even the war in Ukraine and Russia’s ensuing isolation from Europe have failed to halt Vucic’s networking in Moscow. The optics are too bad now for Vucic to meet or even call Putin, but personal interactions between the two countries’ leaderships still abound. In the absence of Vucic, his loyal henchman, Aleksandar Vulin, now knocks at various doors in Moscow to keep Belgrade in the right people’s favour.
Over his consecutive tenures as defence minister, interior minister, and head of Serbia’s main intelligence service, the BIA, Vulin has developed such a close rapport with Russia’s security heads that it landed him on the US sanctions list in July 2023, leading to his temporary dismissal in November.
He spent the next five months as a private citizen, but the lack of official status didn’t prevent him from making as many as three trips to Russia over this period, when he met then Security Council secretary Nikolai Patrushev (twice), the head of the SVR foreign intelligence service Sergei Narishkin (twice), and the Federal Security Service, FSB head, Alexander Bortnikov.
On Vulin’s return to the Serbian government in May this year, his first visit in his new post as deputy prime minister for cooperation with the BRICS countries was, predictably, to Moscow. There he met Russia’s new Security Council secretary, Sergei Shoigu, Interior Minister Vladimir Kolokoltsev and other top security and foreign policy officials.
Regardless of Vulin’s formal duties, his mission remains the same: to establish personal ties with Russia’s leading siloviki, shower them in the crudest flattery possible and convince them that Vucic is the best ally Moscow could possibly have in the Balkans.
The narrative is that, yes, at times Belgrade has to take anti-Russian steps, but it is the West that forces them on Serbia, in order to publicise them later and sour the eternal Russian-Serbian friendship. Moscow shouldn’t fall into this trap.
The myth of the eternal Russia-Serbia friendship remains of supreme value – and neither Western nor domestic ‘provocations’ could be allowed to taint it.
Comments: Serbia had a thriving arms industry during the cold war when it was part of Yugoslavia, and is a manufacturer of Soviet-standard ammunition calibres still widely in use in Ukraine’s armed forces. It is also joining a global trend of looking to boost arms sales at a time when Russia has launched a war economy that has ramped up production faster than Ukraine’s western allies.
Serbia is neither a member of NATO nor the EU, and its people have long had a sentimental attachment to Russia while resenting the west after NATO’s bombing campaign on their country in 1999. Belgrade also counts on Moscow to block international recognition of Kosovo, the former Serbian province recognised by most western states, but which is held back from UN membership by Russia and China.
Vučić has resisted western pressure to adopt the Russia sanctions regime and has allowed Russian flights to continue, even as he says he is committed to his country becoming an EU member. He has also sought to hedge his bets and keep a distance between himself and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian President Putin has long been aware of Serbia’s dual foreign policy and somewhat accepts it as normal. (As well as the foreign policy of China, Turkey and many others, of course). However, in the conditions of the united West’s attempts to isolate Russia internationally, the master of the Kremlin is forced to accept others as they are. And to maneuver as much as possible.
In addition, in the publication of the FT there is also an element of disparaging Serbia, which is also reported in Moscow.
