Spiegel on Vučić: A puppeteer from Belgrade, he sees himself as a representative of Serbs living in Montenegro, BiH...

"The West considers President Aleksandar Vucic to be an important interlocutor. Vladimir Putin should be happy about that," writes the German magazine Spiegel.

"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 a 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 that 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 newspaper writes.

"Relations with Brussels and Washington have been announced, but those with Beijing and Moscow are also being nurtured. Belgrade has not joined the sanctions against Russia to date. 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 member of NATO, 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 discord outside of Ukraine, into the heart of Europe, the author asks - and offers the following answer:

"Polls among Russian Orthodox brothers in Serbia confirm this. Although that 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 pincers" 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 with iron pincers. That is why Vučić captures in the castle the clergy, who in the nineties were critically oriented towards the Great Serbian despot Slobodan Milošević - during whose time Vučić served as the Minister of Information."

"If you want to get an idea of ​​the sense of 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 mosaics in the temple, and that "the president Serbia stood guard when Putin came in 2019 to insert three red, white and blue stones into the image of the Redeemer - in the colors of both the Russian and Serbian tricolors."

Vučić's "trump 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 populated by Serbs," the newspaper said.

"Kosovo is a 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 Porfiri, which he said on Vidovdan in the Gračanica monastery.

"The scenography is unreal: hidden behind the walls of a 14th-century monastery, 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, whether he insults his Albanian negotiating partner, Prime Minister Aljbin Kurti, as 'terrorist scum'."

Bosnia and Herzegovina - "signs point to a storm"

When it comes to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Spiegel recalls that in 2015, Vučić, then Prime Minister of Serbia, personally appeared at the Potočari Memorial Center near Srebrenica.

"Almost 7.000 Muslims who were killed by Serbian soldiers and members of the paramilitary were buried there. Vučić had to flee from the angry relatives of the victims under police protection," the newspaper writes.

"With Vučić's blessing, the denial of the genocide has now become institutional. The Great Serbian ideology is alive, it just changed its name and is now called 'Serbski svet'," the German magazine quotes the words of Hasan Hasanović, who survived the massacre as a young man, and today works at the Memorial Center .

He says that whoever denies the genocide also denies "that the Serbian state and its institutions are behind that mass murder."

Spiegel assesses that with the Agreement on Cooperation between Serbia and Republika Srpska in the field of education and cultural policy, Vučić "planted another explosive device" in 2020.

It is unclear, it is stated, "if and when the President of the RS Milorad Dodik will take seriously his plan to break up Bosnia and Herzegovina - that geopolitical experiment, as he mocks it - by secession of the Republika Srpska."

"Vučić talks about a 'big and serious crisis' in the neighboring country, without stating how he intends to contribute to the calming of tensions. At the meeting held on July 20 in Belgrade, attended by the patriarch, he and Dodik, the issues were reportedly discussed of 'national importance for the Serbian people'. It sounds as if the signs point to a storm," writes the German magazine.

Belgrade calculation in Montenegro

In Montenegro, a German journalist spoke with priest Mijajlo Backović.

He introduced him as a veteran of the 63rd Yugoslav Parachute Brigade from the Kosovo War, and also mentioned his nickname: "Montenegro Rambo".

Backović, the newspaper writes, "participated in the founding of the Balkan Cossacks in the Adriatic, maintains contact with the motorcycle gangs of the 'Night Wolves' linked to the Kremlin and is a regular guest in Russia. He even offered the ruler of the Kremlin his own plot of land on the Adriatic, in case Putin wants to leave Moscow for a while."

"I don't want to be a part of the 'Serbian world' that Mr. Vučić wants in Belgrade, because we Montenegrins love freedom, we don't love chains," Backović was quoted as saying by the paper.

"However, according to Backović, it is indisputable that 'Montenegro is essentially an ethnically Serbian state'. In the last polls, 32 percent of the population declared themselves as Serbs."

"The Belgrade calculation is as follows," concludes the German magazine: "the more ethnic Serbs there are in Montenegro according to statistics, the greater the justification to protect them and to ask about their fate. This strategic approach was violently demonstrated by Putin on the example of Russian citizens in Georgia, Donbass and Crimea," concludes Spiegel.