"He is, without a doubt, a great statesman. The President of Serbia is almost two meters tall. Only in conversation, Aleksandar Vučić sometimes pretends to be smaller than he is. (...) The president sees himself as the guarantor of peace in the Western Balkans, but anyone who understands Serbian, reads between the lines and follows the agitation of private TV broadcasters loyal to the regime will come to a different conclusion: let's say Vučić has everything it takes to be an arsonist."
This is how a very extensive article entitled "Puppeteer from Belgrade" begins, published in the print edition of the weekly Spiegel, and signed by journalist Walter Mayer.
The author reminds that "tens of thousands of people have been protesting against the autocratic president for months in Belgrade and other cities of Serbia".
"The Belgrade puppeteer's foreign policy course is like walking on a tightrope," the paper writes. "Relations with Brussels and Washington have been announced, but those with Beijing and Moscow are also being nurtured. To date, Belgrade has not joined the sanctions against Russia. Instead, the harassment of Russian oppositionists who fled to Serbia is growing."
The role of Moscow
"In general, things in the region have gotten out of control lately," the German magazine assesses. "In Kosovo, members of the Serbian minority loyal to Vučić disabled dozens of KFOR soldiers, in Bosnia a referendum is being announced on the secession of the majority-Serb part of Republika Srpska, and in Montenegro, a NATO member, more pro-Serbian forces are preparing to take over the helm of the government."
"Is Moscow using Vučić as a tool in an effort to spread strife outside of Ukraine, into the heart of Europe," the author asks - and offers the following answer:
"Surveys among Russian Orthodox brothers in Serbia confirm this. Although the Balkan country has been negotiating with Brussels for almost ten years, more than half of the citizens would vote against EU membership in a referendum, and 45 percent of respondents describe Putin as the best and top world politician. He is followed - at a considerable distance - by the head of state of China, Xi Jinping."
"Iron Tongs" SPC
"Vučić sees himself as a representative of all Serbs, including those who live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo. The central role in his calculations is played by the powerful Serbian Orthodox Church, which holds 15 million Orthodox Serbs around the world in an iron grip. That is why Vučić traps the clergy, who in the nineties were critically oriented towards the Great Serbian despot Slobodan Milošević - during which Vučić served as the Minister of Information."
"If you want to get an idea of the sense of the mission of the president and a large part of the Serbian elite, it is enough to look at the enormous scale of the Cathedral of St. Sava in the heart of Belgrade," writes a German journalist, recalling that Russia's Gazprom financed the creation of the mosaics in the temple, and that "the president Serbia stood guard when Putin came in 2019 to insert three red, white and blue pebbles into the image of the Redeemer - in the colors of both the Russian and Serbian tricolors."
Vučić's "trump card in poker"
"Whenever he is under internal political pressure, Vučić seems to let his violent supporters off the leash in the north of Kosovo, which is mostly inhabited by Serbs," the newspaper said.
"Kosovo is the Gordian knot in the fabric of Europe and Vučić's trump card in the poker for power and sinecure in the Balkans," writes Spiegel. "Legions of senior diplomats on behalf of Brussels or Washington failed to solve that problem, and Vučić does not think of giving up his negotiating role for a price."
"Kosovo is as important to our church as the Vatican is to Catholics," Spiegel reports, and the words of Patriarch Porfiry, which he said on Vidovdan in the Gračanica monastery.
"The scenography is unreal: hidden behind the walls of a monastery from the 14th century, on a Serbian island surrounded by Albanian villages, the patriarch sits guarded by policemen and KFOR soldiers. And he calls for peace between nations, which Vučić regularly threatens from Belgrade - either by allowing Serbian troops to advance to the border with Kosovo, or by insulting his Albanian negotiating partner, Prime Minister Aljbin Kurti, as 'terrorist scum.'"
Read the entire text on the website Deutsche says.
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