Aleksandar Vučić promised punishment to Serbs from the special operation zone in Ukraine

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promised that all citizens of the country who take or will take part in hostilities in Ukraine “will be arrested” as soon as they are “within reach” of the country’s law enforcement agencies. Since the beginning of the year, the authorities of the republic, which have been facing demands to investigate the recruitment of Serbian fighters in the Wagner PMC, have lost interest in this organization.

Vučić gave a sharp rebuke to the actions of Wagner PMC the day before in an interview with Politico. The President said that he did not need “neither applause nor criticism” from this organization, and called the actions of its “emissaries” in recruiting Serbian citizens into the special operation zone in Ukraine inconsistent with the status of a “friendly country”. Vučić stressed that all Serbian citizens who are in Ukraine now or will go there later can count on arrest in their homeland. This will happen “as soon as they are within reach” of Serbian law enforcement agencies. The President recalled that Serbia condemned what is happening in Ukraine.

Under the laws of the country, unauthorized participation in any hostilities outside its borders is a criminal offense. Corresponding changes were made to the Serbian Criminal Code in 2014, after a scandal erupted in the republic due to the appearance of local volunteers in the military conflict zone in Donbass. Since then, dozens of people have been convicted of this crime.

Some Serbian volunteers later became public figures in Russia. For example, during the broadcast of Vladimir Putin’s message to the Federal Assembly, the TV cameras stopped several times on Serb Bratislava Zhivkovic, who in 2014 participated in the events in Donbass on the side of the self-proclaimed republics and even led a detachment of Serbian volunteers there. At home, he faced criminal prosecution, but during the proceedings he insisted that he was in the combat zone not a combatant, but a volunteer. In 2022, he again ended up in eastern Ukraine and even received a wound, with which he came to the message.

In January, Vučić already spoke out against the activities of Wagner PMC in Serbia, but the authorities of the country did not reach serious public proceedings with its representatives and contractors. Until February 17 in Belgrade, the police detained the leader of the nationalist organization “People’s Patrol” Damyan Knezevic and the editor of the right-wing radical portal Srbin.info Dejan Zlatanovic. Knezhevich is known for publicly supporting Wagner and even visiting the Wagner Center in St. Petersburg. And the portal headed by Zlatanovich actively covers the events in Ukraine from a pro-Russian position.

It was this site that became one of the first Serbian resources that appeared on Prigozhin Vučić’s response, in which the businessman urges the president “not to hysteria”, because “not a single Serb” in Wagner has been fighting for two months now”: “If someone from Serbov claims to have fought in Wagner PMC in 2023, don’t believe him. This is a fraud”. However, in Serbia, Knezevic and Zlatanovic are accused primarily not of collaborating with Wagner, but of calling for a violent overthrow of the government, which they made at a protest rally in February against the settlement agreement with Kosovo. Knezevic, in particular, told the audience that “let Vucic wait for him,” because the Serbs had no choice but “them or us,” and promised that he was capable of much more than “just riots.”

Their public activation has caused dissatisfaction among Serbian public figures in recent months. Chedomir Stojkovic, a local lawyer and one of the leaders of the Oktyabr human rights group, unsuccessfully applied to the Belgrade prosecutor’s office in January with a demand to check not only Knezevic, but also high-ranking officials, up to the head of the Serbian intelligence service, the Security and Information Agency (BIA), Alexander Vulin, for cooperation with Russian structures. Stojkovic still believes that it is “too early to judge the sincerity of Vucic’s words.” “Yes, we see that Knezhevich was arrested, and Vacic (the leader of the far-right organization Desnitsa, Misha Vacic – Vedomosti) deleted photos with the Wagner group from social networks. At the same time, it seems that the Serbian Wagnerites are now less visible. This may indicate both that the country’s counterintelligence has begun to work, and that the state agreed with the Russian side to reduce activity in order to demonstrate this to the West, ”he told Vedomosti.

The Serbian authorities have been fighting mercenaries for years, and not only in connection with the consequences of the conflict in Ukraine, Oleg Bondarenko, editor-in-chief of Balkanist.ru, draws attention. The law on the ban on mercenarism itself was adopted back in 2014 and it affected both those who fought in the Donbass and those who were in Syria, the expert notes. “There is a minority in Serbia who were recruited for the war on the side of the banned terrorist Islamic State,” Bondarenko explains. It is noteworthy that after returning to the Balkans, Islamists, as a rule, were arrested and imprisoned for real terms, and the punishment for those who fought in the Donbass was limited to suspended sentences, he notes. In other words, the attitude towards them was, and remains, very loyal, Bondarenko believes, “an explosion of emotions and a media effect” is caused by the actions of marginals who publicly announce their interaction with the Wagner PMC. In this case, Vučić, who is now under pressure from the West, is forced to respond and thus “keep the balance,” says Bondarenko.