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Southeast Europe
December 1, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 14
US think tank calls for military presence to counter “breathtaking” Russian meddling in Western Balkans
Clare Nuttall in Bucharest
An influential Washington-based think tank has called for a permanent US presence in the Western Balkans to counter growing Russian influence in the region.
A new report from the Atlantic Council, that is funded by Nato, warns that the region has been neglected by the US since the wars of the 1990s, allowing Russia and other actors to “reshap[e] the geopolitical landscape”. As a result of this neglect, says the report by the think tank, the Western Balkans has “become a much more dangerous place”.
“The Western Balkans were supposed to be a solved problem,” says the report, citing slow but measurable progress over the last two decades. “In 2016, however, two important changes upended the status quo by undermining much of the Balkans’ trust in their short-term future in the EU and Nato.”
These came first from the EU — where the UK’s Brexit referendum and a Dutch vote rejecting the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine “sent an unmistakable signal to the region that the European Union has no immediate appetite for further enlargement” — and then from the US, where concerns were raised by President Donald Trump’s questioning of the Washington’s commitment to Nato and uncertainty over his relationship with Russia.
Camp Bonsteel in Kosovo, which the Atlantic Council proposes using for a permanent US military presence.
“The last two years have seen breath-taking attempts by Russia to capitalise on the region’s lingering pathologies to undermine the European project,” claims the paper published on November 28.
It argues that Moscow’s actions have been “par- ticularly malign” in Bosnia & Herzegovina, which it assesses as “the most fragile post-Yugoslav state”. It singles out Moscow’s cultivation of Re- publika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, encour- aging his attempts to hold a referendum on the Serb entity’s secession from Bosnia. “Dodik and his inner circle have spent more than a decade trying to tear apart [Bosnia’s] fragile state struc- tures,” comments the report.
It also details Russian “games” in Kosovo, such as alleged intelligence activities in the Serb- dominated north of the country, the dissemination of “fake news” and — most notably — the journey of a Russian-funded train emblazoned with
the words “Kosovo is Serbia” that Serbia’s rail operator threatened to drive into Kosovo.
The report also details the suspicions of Russian intelligence involvement in the 2016 coup attempt in Montenegro, and Russia’s role in deepening the long political crisis in Macedonia. It accuses Rus- sian diplomats of “backing VMRO-DPMNE to the hilt”, which helped the conservative party to cling onto power and, while a new government has now