Even before its rebirth as a nation in the 1990s, Serbia had acquired a reputation abroad as Russia’s stalwart Slavic ally in the Western Balkans.

Yet, as Vuk Vuksanović argues in Serbia’s Balancing Act: Between Russia and the West (Bloomsbury, 2025), two centuries of history and the 25 years since the fall of Slobodan Milošević tell a more nuanced story.

"When it comes to Russia's interests,” he writes, “there are no sacred cows in Serbia-Russia relations". Governments in Belgrade will be courted and then discarded depending on Moscow’s needs, and they know it. For their part, the Serbs depend on Russian political support in their campaign for a face-saving settlement of the long-running Kosovo dispute but know their economic success hinges on their ties to the EU and the US. Belgrade must "manipulate the superpower rivalry to secure economic resources from both superpowers and its political strategic autonomy".

Vuk Vuksanović is a foreign policy expert at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, an associate of the Central and South-East Europe Programme at LSE IDEAS, and a prominent media commentator on strategy in the Balkans.

*His book recommendations were Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe by Dimitar Bechev (Yale University Press, 2017) and Why War? by Christopher Coker (Hurst, 2021).

Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news.

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Rival Power

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