Brussels puts pressure on President Aleksandar Vucic to enjoin him to choose his camp more clearly. Committed to the EU membership process, Serbia could be forced to apply sanctions against its Russian ally.
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Has the time of choice sounded for Serbia? This country of the Balkans with prorussian trends, which claims a form of neutrality in the conflict in Ukraine while ensuring that they want to join the European Union (EU), is in any case the subject of unpublished pressures from Brussels to choose its more clearly camp. In its annual report on the advances of membership negotiations published Wednesday, October 12, the European Commission draws up a severe indictment against the foreign policy led by Belgrade since the start of the war in Ukraine, by deploring that Serbia “continues to maintain Intense relationships with Russia “.
Even though the candidate countries are supposed to align their foreign policy with that of the European Union, the commission sends a long list of grievances to the Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic, triumphantly re -elected last April: “Serbia did not explicitly condemned the Russian aggression “; “Certain declarations and actions of Serbian officials have gone directly against EU positions”; “Serbia has refused to impose sanctions against Russia”; “Russian officials who appear on the EU sanctions lists have been received in Belgrade” … The gravity of these reproaches has been a first since that the membership negotiations began with this country of seven million of inhabitants, which also makes very moderate progress on the rest of the criteria defined to integrate the EU, whether it is the fight against corruption or the principles linked to the rule of law.
After having established, in a learned calculation, that the alignment of the Serbian foreign policy with that of the EU regressed “from 64 % in 2021 to 45 % in August 2022”, the Commission concluded as well as Serbia “fell” on the path of European membership. This qualifier is “employed for the first time” by Europeans, deplores Srdjan Majstorovic, ex-member of the Serbian negotiation team for the membership of the EU, which now presides over the Belgrade European Policy Center, a circle Proeuropian reflection.
“Serbian leaders missed their bet by thinking that Putin was going to win the war in Ukraine quickly. Now that it becomes more and more clear that Russia will be entangled in this conflict, this should encourage them to change their politics “, he hopes. “Vucic has bought time, but an alignment with sanctions has now become inevitable if he wants to respect his proclaimed objective to become a member of the EU”, also judge Ivan Vejvoda, researcher at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.
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