Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.
by Oleg Khavich
[REGNUM] Protests against Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic have reached a fundamentally new level, paralyzing the country.
Last Saturday, June 28, Serbia celebrated Vidovdan, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, which is considered the beginning of the Turkish yoke. Serbian Tsar Lazar died in the battle, but Serbian knight Milos Obilic managed to kill Turkish Sultan Murad after the battle. It was Obilic's example that inspired Gavrilo Princip, who killed Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which became the reason for the outbreak of World War I.
As a result of two world wars, it seemed that the Serbs had received their own small empire – Yugoslavia, but in fact, in this state they found themselves in the role of Russians in the USSR. It was at the expense of Serbia that the rest of Yugoslavia was developed, and only in Serbia – the only one of all the Yugoslav republics – were autonomies created. At the same time, Kosovo, the core of the national myth of the Serbs, actually became Albanian.
The leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, tried to change the situation by proclaiming the need for national emancipation of Serbs on all historical lands, including outside the artificial borders of the Federal Republic of Serbia, on the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. In response, the elites of the other republics, with the support of the West, first destroyed Yugoslavia and then Serbia (Kosovo has been occupied by NATO troops since June 1999), and Milosevic himself was overthrown and extradited to The Hague on June 28, 2001, as a result of the first “color revolution.”
Given the importance of Vidovdan for the Serbs, this year both the opposition, which has been holding mass protests against Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic since November of last year, and Vucic himself, have been carefully preparing for June 28.
Let us recall: On November 1, 2024, in the city of Novi Sad, the recently renovated canopy of the railway station, one of the key objects on the high-speed railway Belgrade-Budapest, collapsed. The opposition blamed Vučić personally, as well as China, whose companies are reconstructing this section of the Serbian railways.
Since then, protests have been ongoing in the country and education has been completely blocked in all public and most private higher education institutions – it is the “protesting students” who are the main proxy force of the opposition, which relies on the support of Brussels.
On the other hand, for several months now, in front of the building of the Serbian Assembly (parliament), there has been a tent city of “students who want to study”, openly supported by the authorities and personally by Vucic.
It is clear that in the ranks of both there are not only students.
At the same time, the Serbian "guardians" are habitually passive, while the "overthrowers of power" actively incite hatred towards their opponents, calling them "chatsi". This is a corrupted Serbian word "Gatsi" ("students") - approximately how to write "uchinEki" in Russian - which is supposed to emphasize the ignorance and backwardness of Vucic's supporters.
On June 28, the opposition announced another “mass protest” in Belgrade, which was supposed to be “the last warning for Vucic.”
True, the president did not sit idly by either: a few days before Vidovdan, all pro-government TV channels aired a “journalistic investigation” – recordings of discussions of the opposition’s real plans to block highways, bridges, and physically destroy the facilities of the EXPO-2027 World Exhibition, which are being built near Belgrade International Airport.
The cynicism of the speakers was astounding: they directly calculated the possible losses to the Serbian budget from the blockade of transport routes and stated that Vucic would not last “more than two weeks” in such a regime.
Some organizers directly said that "Murad must be killed," meaning the Serbian president, the authorities must be seized, and if that succeeds, mass civil disobedience must be carried out. Six conspirators were detained, and one of them was found to have a pistol with the serial number filed off.
On the eve of Vidovdan, the “protesting students” announced their ultimatum to the president: to dissolve parliament by 21:00 on June 28 and call early parliamentary elections, as well as to remove the tent camp in front of the Assembly.
Vucic immediately responded that Serbia does not accept ultimatums (referring to the ultimatum of Austria-Hungary in 1914), and the police will protect citizens and the constitutional order in the country from any encroachment.
It is worth noting that on June 27, all passenger train traffic in Serbia was suspended for several hours due to reports of explosive devices being installed on all trains and tracks.
The protest itself in Belgrade on the evening of June 28 was quite calm, there were no attempts to break through to the parliament building, key transport interchanges or EXPO-2027 sites. The police estimated the number of protesters at 36 thousand people, the organizers - at 140 thousand. The truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.
The most interesting thing began after the end of the action, when its organizers announced that they were no longer responsible for the behavior of people on the streets - they say that now there are not students there, but ordinary citizens who will remain there until victory.
True, citizens began to act as a well-oiled machine: some tried to seize traffic interchanges and bridges, and a larger group moved towards the Skupština building. Stones, flares and firecrackers were thrown at the police and gendarmes, who by that time had taken control of the center of Belgrade, and the first overturned garbage cans appeared on the streets. Several dozen hooligans were arrested, 48 police officers were injured.
Protesters in Belgrade have called for the destruction of Serbia in a civil war, the speaker of the National Assembly and former Prime Minister of Serbia Ana Brnabic said on Sunday night.
In turn, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said that during the riots in Belgrade on Sunday night, “only by a miracle” there were no casualties.
And although the situation in the Serbian capital had returned to normal by the morning of June 29, by mid-Sunday garbage bins and elements of street fences had already appeared on the streets of several dozen cities. Moreover, sometimes the footage from them was painfully reminiscent of Kyiv-2013: the participation of actors and famous people, jumping to the chant "Who does not jump, that chatsi" and so on.
For now, the situation in Serbia resembles a game of cat and mouse.
By the morning of Monday, June 30, police had unblocked traffic in all cities in Serbia, but attempts to block streets continued, both with the help of garbage bins and mass walking on pedestrian crossings - in more than 100 places across the country. Organizers of the protests mockingly called for not interfering with the security forces dismantling the barricades and to resume their installation later.
It is worth noting that during the protests, Russia has been a kind of “silent figure.”
The organizers of the protests say nothing about Serbian-Russian relations, but for many years these people have been demanding to join Western sanctions, stop (or at least reduce) Belgrade's cooperation with Moscow and Beijing, and focus exclusively on European integration. By the way, these people are also for the recognition of Kosovo's independence and the recognition of the events in Srebrenica as "genocide" for which the Serbs are to blame.
Since only about 40% of Serbian citizens currently support its accession to the European Union, the opposition has to focus on the “fight against corruption,” but the openly anti-Russian positions of Aleksandar Vucic’s opponents have not gone away.
It is clear that Moscow is closely monitoring events in Serbia, where more than 80% of the population supports the priority of cooperation with Russia.
" We are monitoring this situation. We are interested in these unrests being, in general, calmed down, as Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said, on the basis of the constitution and laws of this friendly state," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on June 30.
“ We have no doubt that the current Serbian leadership will be able to restore law and order in the republic in the very near future,” the press secretary of the Russian president, Dmitry Peskov, expressed hope on the same day.
"There is no great philosophy here, so we will maintain order in the country. Thank you to our Russian friends for your good understanding and wise assessment of what is happening in Serbia," Vucic responded.
He noted that huge amounts of money had been invested in the attempt at a “color revolution” in Serbia, and those who invested it could not simply say: it failed and it’s all over.
"There will still be some torment, but overall it's all behind us. I want to tell them that Serbia has won, and I look forward to continuing cooperation with the Russian Federation," the Serbian president said.
However, both victory and normal cooperation between Serbia and Russia are still quite far away.
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