For more than a decade now, Vladimir Putin has sought to reverse what he called in 2005 the “major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century,” that is, the collapse of the Soviet Union. Playing a very weak economic hand as oil prices fell, and beset by major demographic problems and an aging Soviet-era military, Putin has done quite well. At minimal risk, he invaded Georgia, and he keeps it under his thumb today using economic, military, and diplomatic pressure. Energy remains an important tool for Moscow; a recent agreement allows Russia to pipe natural gas through Georgia to Russia-friendly Armenia.
Russia seized the Crimea, continues military operations in Eastern Ukraine, and is the major power in the Black Sea, from which it has projected power into the Middle East. Russian arms and support have prolonged Syria’s civil war and all but assured the brutal Syrian dictator’s throne. To the north, Putin threatens the Baltic states with cyberattacks, the possibility of quick and mass mobilizations, and propaganda aimed at dividing ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers within those States.
Traced on a map, Russia’s influence is an incomplete parabola that reaches from the Black Sea through the Eastern Mediterranean and curves northeast into the Baltic Sea. Moscow is now meddling in the Balkans. If it is successful in restarting the ethnic/religious disputes there, the unfinished parabola that Russia has carved since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power will be completed with major influence that reaches its western vertex in the Balkan heart of central Europe. A cordon sanitaire this is not, yet; but Putin’s aims are clear.
Russian tampering in the Balkans goes back centuries. In their struggles with the Ottomans, Russia aided Serb rebels with arms in the 19th century. Russian “volunteers” for the Slav cause and its mobilization in the face of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s declaration of war against Serbia in July 1914 helped ignite World War I. The pattern of Russia’s behavior in the Balkans has not changed.
Political tensions are rising in Bosnia-Herzegovina. More than two decades removed from the country’s bloody, ethnically fueled war and the collapse of Yugoslavia, the divided country is experiencing a resurgence in separatist rhetoric from Bosnian Serbs in the Republika Srpska, Bosnia’s autonomous Serbian enclave. Separatist talk is certain to push Bosnian Croats toward Zagreb and increase the fragility of the Dayton Accords, the 1995 arrangement that established the Republika Srpska as an autonomous part of Bosnia and ended the Balkans conflict. There’s a good reason “Balkanization” has entered our vocabulary as a description of splintering states. Russian involvement has helped inflame the Serbs’ resentment toward their neighbors. Increased instability in the Balkans challenges the NATO alliance, threatens the European Union, and offers Vladimir Putin another low-cost option to stick it to the West.
Specifically, Russia has increased its public support of Milorad Dodik, the president of the Republika Srpska, who has called for a referendum on independence within the Serbian-majority region of Bosnia. In September 2016, Dodik held a referendum in Republika Srpska that reestablished January 9 as a day of celebration for the region’s 1992 declaration of “independence” from Bosnia. Dodik held the referendum, which won 99.8 percent of the vote in the region, in defiance of a ruling by the Bosnia-Herzegovina Constitutional Court that it discriminated against non-Serb citizens. The international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Valentin Inzko, declared the September 2016 referendum to be both “illegal and unconstitutional.”