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Russian ally Serbia has received a rare admonishment about supplying arms and ammunition to Ukraine, which Moscow said amounted to a “shot in the back”.
President Aleksandar Vučić, who has refused to join western sanctions against Russia for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, last year told the Financial Times that Serbian arms and ammunition were ending up on the Ukrainian side via intermediaries he claimed to have no control over.
Russian President Vladimir Putin brought up the issue during a recent meeting in Moscow, and his foreign intelligence agency (SVR) issued an unusual statement accusing Belgrade of disloyalty.
“Serbia’s military industry is trying to shoot Russia in the back,” the SVR said, listing Serb arms makers that it said produced for Ukraine. “The desire to profit from the blood of fraternal Slavic peoples has made them completely forget who their real friends are and who their enemies are.”
The SVR said Serbia was following “a simple scheme using fake end-user certificates and intermediary countries” to supply hundreds of thousands of shells and a million rounds of small-arms ammunition in a “contribution to the war unleashed by the west, the outcome of which Europe would like to see as a ‘strategic defeat’ of Russia”.
Vučić made a late-night television appearance on Thursday to set the record straight, arguing that his government had not issued any export licences to Ukraine and that no missiles had been delivered. He dismissed accusations that he had switched loyalties from one foreign power to another.
“No, gentlemen, we work only for Serbia,” he said.
Ivan Vejvoda, a fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, said Moscow was signalling it was fed up with Vučić’s balancing act, as his country was still nominally committed to joining the EU.
“This is their way to warn Vučić that sitting on several chairs is becoming unacceptable to them,” Vejvoda said, adding that there was no way the arms deliveries had happened without Russia’s knowledge.
But “Vučić can’t change his attitude”, Vejvoda said, as this minimal support for Ukraine “has been a fundamental way of showing Serbia is leaning westward” and the embattled Serbian leader’s political survival depended on keeping this balancing act between Russia and the west.
Washington has also pressured Vučić over Russian oil imports, with the Trump administration extending a deadline until the end of June for his government to settle a dispute over the country’s main refiner NIS, which is owned by Gazprom.
The back and forth between Belgrade and Moscow comes ahead of a second round of talks between Russia and Ukraine that could take place in Istanbul on Monday, though Kyiv has yet to confirm its participation. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Thursday said Russia had not put forward the so-called memorandum of understanding it had pledged to present before the talks.
“Russia is dragging out the war and doing everything it can simply to deceive the countries that are still trying to influence Moscow with words rather than pressure,” Zelenskyy said.
Additional reporting by Christopher Miller
