Serbia has invested hugely in rearmament in recent years, making it the biggest military force in the Western Balkans. Neighboring countries are alarmed.
Is Serbia planning to destabilize neighbors Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina or even to launch a military attack?
Both Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani and her Bosnian counterpart Denis Becirovic have recently warned about such a scenario.
In a television interview in September, Osmani said that there is hope for the Western Balkans to join the EU and NATO, “but the precondition for this is to treat Serbia for what it is: a satellite state of Russia that is deepening its military, economic and political cooperation with Russia.”
Becirovic’s warning about Serbia’s territorial inclinations, which he issued at the United Nations General Assembly in New York at the end of September, was even more insistent.
“Here, at the podium of the UN General Assembly, I want to publicly warn the global audience that, once again, the leadership of [the] Republic of Serbia is threatening the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said.
Belgrade’s ‘shopping spree for weapons’
Belgrade has for years been investing massively in its armed forces, buying modern weaponry such as French fighter jets and Russian attack helicopters, which Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has praised as “flying tanks.”
It has also purchased Chinese air defense systems, which were flown from Beijing to Belgrade shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
There have also been reports that Serbia has acquired from Iran thousands of drones of the kind used by Russia to target Ukrainian cities on a daily basis.
The British business magazine The Economist wrote in 2021 that Belgrade’s “shopping spree for weapons” was making its neighbors nervous.
Serbia stockpiles weapons
The renowned Stockholm International Peace Research Institute noted in 2022 that at €1.3 billion ($1.4 billion), Belgrade’s defense budget was 10 times bigger than Kosovo’s.
Serbia’s military predominance in the region is illustrated by its 250-strong fleet of battle tanks, which is more than all other former Yugoslav republics put together (in comparison, Germany’s armed forces have 295 tanks).
Croatia is second in the former Yugoslavia with 75, Bosnia third with 45 and North Macedonia fourth with 31. Neither Montenegro nor Kosovo have any tanks at all.
This is one reason why Kosovo’s small, but growing armed forces were equipped with Turkish Bayraktar drones last year and 250 US Javelin anti-tank weapon systems this year.
Without these two weapons systems, which the Ukrainian army is successfully deploying in its fight against Russia, Ukraine in its current independent form would no longer exist.
The ‘Serb World’ project
This raises the question of why Belgrade has been stockpiling so many weapons in recent years without being under threat from its neighbors. Is President Vucic planning to attack Serbia’s neighbors, as suggested by the president of Kosovo?
Declarations, threats, and the actions of Serbia’s leadership would appear to back up this claim.
Serbia’s leadership is pushing a project known as “Serb World” — a slightly watered-down version of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” ideology — which has met with a positive response from Serbs in neighboring Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Milosevic died in 2006 in his cell at the detention center of the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague. To reach his nationalistic objective for Serbia — namely to unite all Serb-inhabited regions of former Yugoslavia — Milosevic started four wars in the 1990s that killed 130,000 people.
Several high-ranking members of Serbia’s government served under Milosevic, including President Aleksandar Vucic and Interior Minister Ivica Dacic, both of whom at one point led Milosevic’s propaganda team.
