01.03.2023, Belgrade
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic promised to arrest Serbian citizens, recruited by the private military company (PMC) Wagner for participation in a special operation to denazify Ukraine, in an interview published by Politico on March 1.
Vucic said that citizens of his country recruited to participate in the special operation in Ukraine “are going to be arrested when they come back to Serbia and [are] within reach of our institutions.”
“You don’t recruit like that in a friendly country,” the Serbian president resented the Russian PMC staffing policy.
Vucic had previously spoken harshly against the participation of Serbian citizens in conflicts outside the country, recalling that such activities are illegal. The head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, in turn, then answered the Serbian president that he had already had “no Serbian citizens” in the PMC for a long time.
Editorial comment
Vucic is in a hard position. He is a pro-Western politician, but in Serbia, a significant part of the population supports Russia and recalls with gratitude the help of the Russian state and Russian volunteers in difficult times for Serbia, including during the NATO military aggression.
Now Vucic is like a tightrope walker. To stay in power, he cannot completely ignore the vast majority of his population. In other words, he cannot take an openly anti-Russian stance. But he continues to pursue accession to the European Union as his main foreign policy vector. And Brussels will demand Vucic as Serbian President to show more loyalty, including in the form of condemnation of his own patriotic citizens who have decided to pay their debt to the Russian-Serbian brotherhood with arms in their hands.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
