Moscow is seeking to exploit ethnic tensions in the Western Balkans to provoke "instability and hinder the region's integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions," the U.S. State Department has said.
The warning came after retired U.S. General Wesley Clark, the former NATO supreme allied commander in Europe, recently cautioned that Russia, which maintains close ties with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, is using Belgrade as a proxy to sow discord in the region.
Serbia, which has been a candidate for membership in the European Union since 2012, has so far refused to impose sanctions on Moscow over its war against Ukraine, even though it voted in favor of several UN resolutions condemning Russia's aggression.
Tensions have been on the rise in recent months in northern Kosovo, where there's a sizeable ethnic Serb minority, and in Republika Srpska, the Serb-majority entity of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Republika Srpska leader Milorad Dodik, who has been put under sanctions by the United States and Britain over his efforts to undermine the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the Balkan country's civil war, has also been on friendly terms, with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Dodik's separatist statements have been one of the main stumbling blocks in Bosnia's progress toward EU membership, after it became a candidate in 2022.
"It is clear that Russia does not support the same European future for the countries in the Western Balkans that they themselves have chosen and that the people of the region deserve. Russia seeks to exploit interethnic tensions, create instability, and obstruct the region’s integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions," a State Department spokesperson told RFE/RL.
In Serb-dominated northern Kosovo, tensions have remained high since an incident in September 2023 that left an ethnic Albanian police officer dead after an encounter with masked commandos allegedly led by a Kosovar Serb politician.
A long-delayed promise by Kosovo's government of an association of Kosovar Serb municipalities for dialogue with Pristina and a recent ban on the use of the Serbian dinar, which has remained in widespread use in northern Kosovo, have also added to the tensions with Belgrade, which has not recognized its former province's 2008 declaration of independence.
"We remain concerned about the risk that local tensions will turn into serious political conflagrations that will hold back the states of the region, for instance in northern Kosovo and given threats of secession in Bosnia-Herzegovina," the spokesperson told RFE/RL.
"We are working closely with all parties to minimize those risks."
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Asia James O'Brien has recently described the tensions on northern Kosovo and Republika Srpska's threats to secede as the main security risks in the Western Balkans.
"This is why the United States is working with the Western Balkan countries to strengthen regional cooperation and advance reforms that will lessen opportunity for malign Russian influence and bring lasting peace, stability, and prosperity to the region," the spokesperson said.
"Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine underscores the urgency and importance of these priorities."