Picula: I do not believe that the Kremlin will miss the opportunity to keep Montenegro in a crisis situation

I don't believe that the Kremlin - through people or political groups it has influence over - will miss the opportunity to try to keep Montenegro in some kind of crisis situation, said Tonino Picula, member of the European Parliament and rapporteur for Montenegro.

He said it as a guest on the show Croatian Radio's "Interview of the Week"., commenting on the recent statement of the special envoy of the United States of America for the Western Balkans, Gabriel Escobar, who said that he expects Russia to try to interfere in the presidential election campaign in Montenegro.

"He expressed a fear shared by him and many of us who follow events in the Western Balkans. The general assessment is that Russia does not have the strength to seriously intervene in the situation in the Western Balkans, but it can irritate or influence with its own mechanisms - through the media or through certain replacement or proxy players," added Picula.

He pointed out that it should not be forgotten that Montenegro is the most advanced candidate country from the Western Balkans and a member of NATO.

"There was an attempted coup in 2016, which still has no legal epilogue, and the situation today is certainly more dramatic, the stakes are much higher, but I also believe that the awareness that has grown in the meantime that it is necessary to fight against such influence, so I believe that it will make that Russian purchase less successful," says Picula.

When asked what Milo Đukanović's victory in the presidential elections in Montenegro on March 19 would mean for Montenegro's European path, he said...

"During the past 20 or 25 years, political events or in general a kind of stability in Montenegro could be expressed in the catchphrase of Milo Đukanović's party colleagues, which read - no matter what, Milo will win. However, after August 30, 2020, things in Montenegro change when a heterogeneous coalition came to power that was unable to maintain an internal level of cohesion in order to continue the pro-European agenda in the way that the government did until those elections," he says.

He states that he feels that the government that was replaced is also going through a certain identity crisis.

"And the presidential elections will be the reaction of the citizens to the circumstances in which they have been living for the past two years. It is not only a crisis of political groups, parties or individual politicians, but above all a crisis of institutions. I think that this will cause the need to announce very soon after the presidential elections and early parliamentary elections in order to form a stable composition of the Assembly, which will have to start responding - not for the sake of the EU, but for the sake of the citizens - to the whole set of what the crisis has thrown out in the past two and a half years," concluded Picula.