Russia recruits Serbs for war against Ukraine - The Guardian
Date: 2023-10-19 Author: Кирило Загоруйко Categories: WORLD
The Russian Federation is recruiting Serbs to augment its military forces to wage a brutal war against Ukraine. Moscow plans to recruit hundreds of Serbian citizens.
The Guardian writes that since the beginning of the war against Ukraine, Russia has adopted a number of laws aimed at attracting foreign citizens into its ranks. Vladimir Putin, at a security meeting shortly after his troops attacked Ukraine, said the Kremlin should help foreigners planning to fight on Russia's side.
Since then, the Russian dictator has signed an order to reduce the minimum period of contract military service for foreigners from five to one year, and has also proposed accelerated recruitment of non-Russian combatants into the army.
Serbia, an EU candidate since 2012, has struggled to balance historically close ties with Russia with its push for European integration, and tensions have been heightened by the war against Ukraine, where many Serbs are Russian sympathizers.
Pro-Russian sentiment is particularly strong among Serbian ultranationalists, who have organized a number of pro-Moscow rallies since the start of the war against Ukraine.
Although the number of Serb recruits is not yet large enough to have a tangible impact on the course of hostilities, Moscow's actions risk deteriorating relations with Serbia, one of its few allies in the West.
The head of the recruitment plan, which appears to have been hatched over the summer, was Davor Savicic, a Serb who fought for years as part of the first Russian force to invade Ukraine in 2014.
Savicic is also linked to the paramilitary group Wagner. The Russian publication Fontanka reported that he previously fought in Syria with Wagner. Two sources close to the paramilitary group confirmed Savicic's involvement in its activities to the Guardian.
On August 21, in an interview with the famous pro-Kremlin TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov, Savicic spoke candidly about how he was put in charge of a unit of Serbian citizens in Ukraine.
“Now we are officially signing a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense. The soldiers are passing through the Krasnogorsk military registration and enlistment office,” he said, describing details that coincide with the stories of those recruited. “After additional training, the guys are sent to the Luhansk direction,” Savicic added, referring to the eastern region of Ukraine, which is one of Putin’s key targets.
Sitting next to Savicic during the interview was another Serb, Dejan Beric, who told Solovyov that Serbian fighters had joined the Russian 106th Airborne Division.
“When Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin allowed foreigners to come, I made a plan for how all this would happen and turned to my general,” Beric said, pointing to Savicic. "The guys arrive, we meet them, then they immediately go to the military registration and enlistment office and sign a contract. Most of the foreign volunteers in the Russian army are from Serbia."
Beric, a thin man with long black hair, has previously given interviews to Russian state media about his time fighting as part of the pro-Russian self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic" in Ukraine since 2014. Russian officials appear to be carefully coordinating the recruitment process.
The Russian-language BBC service, which first reported on the Serbian recruitment scheme last week, said it had obtained a private recording of Savicic meeting with unnamed officials in Moscow, in which Savicic says he plans to recruit up to a thousand Serbian citizens who will form their own battalion in part of the 106th Airborne Division.
The Russian Ministry of Defense does not comment on this issue, so the exact number of Serbs who signed a contract with the Russian military remains unclear.
Orders of the Republic, an anti-war Russian whistleblower group, provided the Guardian with a list of 13 Serbs believed to have signed contracts with the Russian military since September. Two of the 13 people named on the list agreed to comment to the Guardian.
“There are about 60-70 of us so far,” said one of the Serbs, who also came from Serbia to Moscow in September, adding that he signed up for the “106th Airborne Division.”
According to him, he decided to join the Russian armed forces for “ideological reasons”, and lucrative military payments play a “secondary role”.
Conscription into the army is fraught with aggravation of relations between Moscow and Belgrade. In January 2022, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic reacted angrily on national television after a Russian news clip showed Serbian volunteers preparing to fight alongside Wagner's troops against Ukraine.
"Why are you, representatives of the Wagner company, calling someone from Serbia, if you know that this is contrary to our rules?" the president said, referring to the law prohibiting Serbs from taking part in conflicts abroad.
Serbian Defense Minister Milos Vucevic also warned Serbs against joining the Russian army. Since then, more than two dozen Serbian nationalists have been prosecuted.
Viktor Zaplatin, a Russian war veteran who recruited Serbian volunteers to fight alongside pro-Russian forces in Ukraine in 2014, said Serbian authorities are preventing fighters from leaving for Russia.
“The risks of criminal prosecution for those who left for Russia and returned to Serbia are very high,” Zaplatin said. “There have always been volunteers from Serbia in Russia. This means that there are volunteers there now, but their number and the quality in which they participate and serve is an organizational secret.”
