Will give Dragan Sutanovac to be the new ambassador of Serbia to United States of America, the public was first informed by the media close to the authorities.
Although the matter has been an open secret for a long time, there is still no official announcement about the appointment, but reactions are coming from both sides of the political scene.
Among the first to speak was the Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vulin, who said that Dragan Šutanovac "will do everything he can to prove in Washington that the bombing of Serbia was justified and necessary and to slander all of us who are against NATO."
"Like every flyover, he will spend his mandate in the hope that our government will pass, and that he will serve the next one as well," Vulin said.
He reminded that Šutanovac is not the first defector from the ranks of the Democratic Party.
"Dragan Šutanovac is not the first convert, but he has certainly always been the most useful to us. The man who managed to expel the DS from the parliament deserves to be forgiven for his ugly past", said Vulin.
Once a high-ranking official of the Democratic Party and Minister of Defense, he will now replace Marko Đurić as ambassador.
Flyovers
The leaders of his former Democratic Party reacted to the news of Sutanovac's appointment as ambassador.
As stated in the press release of this party, "Sutanovac is one of many high flyers who are prone to corruption and personal enrichment".
That party announced on Thursday (January 16) that its former members, who switched to the side of the government and received public positions, will be subject to lustration, that is, that their business operations will be investigated immediately after the change of the current regime.
"'Yellow thieves' or loyalists, as the mafia boss now calls them, are prone to political hochstaplery. (Dragan) Šutanovac, (Goran) Vesić, (Radoslav Milojičić) Kena and (Jelena) Trivan have a lot in common. First of all, they all have a common tendency towards corruption and personal enrichment", the statement of the Democratic Party states.
The party states that these are "flyovers who are always with the government", adding that they are all "rushed" from the DS, which they took advantage of and compromised.
"This is their last flyover, because they will be subject to lustration." "Immediately after the change of regime, their operations will be investigated," the party's press release states.
Goran Vesić, until recently the Minister of Construction in the Government of Serbia, who was dismissed after the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, was a member of the DS from 1994 to 2013.
After that, he became a member of the Serbian Progressive Party and held a number of high government positions.
Once the president of the municipality of Smederevska Palanka, a small one in which the DS was in power at the time, Radoslav Momčilović Kena, in 2020 he was expelled from the membership of the political party in which he had been for 18 years.
After that, he became a member of the Serbian Left, and in the parliamentary elections held in December 2023, he was in 46th place on the list "Aleksandar Vučić - Serbia must not stop" and became a member of the Serbian Parliament.
In June 2024, he officially became a member of SNS.
Jelena Trivan was a member of the DS until 2014. She was the vice president of the party, a member of the Main and Executive Committees.
After leaving the party, she was acting director of the "Official Herald", later director and president of the Board of Directors of the Film Center of Serbia. In September 2021, she became the general director of Telekom Srpska.
Serious conflicts in the SNS?
The president of the Party of Freedom and Justice (SSP), Dragan Đilas, himself a former member of the DS, estimated that the announcement of the appointment of the former president of the Democratic Party, Dragan Sutanovac, as ambassador of Serbia to the USA, after the story about "loyalists" within the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) , cause "serious conflicts" in that party.
"Since the loyalists have sworn in blood that they will not deal with the 'yellow scum', serious conflicts are expected within the SNS," wrote Đilas on the X social network.
The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, spoke earlier about the group of "loyalists" within the SNS, stating that there are 17.000 of them, who allegedly "sworn in blood" that they would never cooperate with "yellow scum", that is, representatives of the former government.
Without official confirmation
Dragan Šutanovac will be the new ambassador of Serbia to the United States of America, according to media close to the government. He was allegedly appointed at the session of the Government of Serbia held on Thursday (January 16).
The Government of Serbia and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have not yet officially announced anything, and "Vreme" has not received confirmation from either of these institutions.
"The Government cannot confirm such information to you, take it from other media", we were told in a short telephone conversation with the authorities in the office of Prime Minister Miloš Vučević.
Marko Đurić, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, previously announced that before the inauguration of the newly elected US President Donald Trump on January 20, Belgrade will send the name of the new Serbian ambassador in Washington to the American side.
