Haris Imamović: What does the defeat of Ukraine mean for Bosnia and Herzegovina?

The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, at the press conference held last week, assessed that in the recent period there has been increased pressure from the West on “Serbia and the Serbian people” primarily due to the change in the war situation in Ukraine.

As Vučić emphasizes, Western countries “feel great pressure due to the advance of Russian forces” and are not sure how the war in Ukraine will end. In the aforementioned context, the President of Serbia interpreted the announced entry of Kosovo into the Council of Europe, but also the pressure on the regime in Republika Srpska.

A similar assessment was made by the leader of the RS, Milorad Dodik, at a special session of the National Assembly of the RS, dedicated to — the global political-security situation (sic!) and its implications for the RS. Dodik did not interpret the OHR’s ​​decision to announce technical changes to the Election Law as an isolated BiH issue, but as part of a broader international trend. He said that a new geopolitical map of the world is being created, and that part of that process is the effort of the international community to impose its will on the RS authorities.

“As a responsible person, I feel that the Republic is in a really delicate situation”, he said, and added that the dilemma for this entity is: “accept subjection, which would mean disappearance [of RS]” — or “choose the path of survival, while making sacrifices”. In other words, according to Dodik, the status quo is unsustainable, and tectonic changes are inevitable.

Dodik said that the unipolar world, in which the USA was the only world power, is a thing of the past, and that we are living in a transition towards a new constellation, in which some countries will not be subjected to American will. Washington, he added, resists the change, and wants to maintain its dominance to the greatest extent possible, if not completely.

“That center of power wants to fence off what is theirs and they want to set up that fence firmly, and they will settle accounts with anyone who opposes them or whom they think could oppose them,” he said. Dodik pointed out that Washington has brought the European Union itself into a “subordinate position”, leaving it no possibility to be an independent global player.

As he explained, the EU had to give up cheap raw materials from Russia, and for geopolitical reasons it showed its readiness to approve the negotiating status for Ukraine, as well as for Bosnia and Herzegovina. “All this gave a new stamp to the processes taking place in the Balkans, and of course within Bosnia and Herzegovina,” said Dodik.

“Geopolitics says that we are in the center of countries, surrounded by NATO and the European Union. There are no examples of functioning countries that have been excluded from Europe and are possibly members of some other association, but are located within the European continent,” he said.

After that, he made a strange twist in his argument. He pointed out that the Americans stopped the process of rapid approaching of BiH to the European Union. It remained unclear — why would they do that, if the European Union, as Dodik himself said, is in a “subordinate position” vis-a-vis Washington?

Furthermore, Dodik repeated his mantra that “the country, which is an international protectorate, cannot advance towards the European Union”. This is not clear either, because how can Bosnia and Herzegovina be a sovereign political factor, when, according to Dodik, the European Union itself is not?

Aside from the aforementioned illogicalities. After we agree with Dodik that, after the start of the war in Ukraine, the European Union did become significantly more dependent on the United States for security and energy than before, let’s ask one very simple question — if a European Union, which has 448 million inhabitants, had to obey the will of the United States (as the president of the RS says), does Dodik really believe that the Republika Srpska, with its 850k inhabitants, can resist American pressure?

“Of course, we know that they don’t listen to us, that they think that we are less important, that we are irrelevant, that they are laughing at us now and that they think that they can find mechanisms that will do everything to get us to behave according to them,” said Dodik, at the aforementioned session of the NSRS.

It is well known that Dodik, in a similar situation, knew how to overcome the international community. We should not forget the year 2007, when the then high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Miroslav Lajčak, imposed amendments that were supposed to prevent blockages in the work of state institutions, but in the end, after threats from Dodik, Lajčak withdrew his measures.

Why not expect the same outcome now?

In 2007, Vladimir Putin gave his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he said that Russia would no longer be subordinated to Washington, and after that the rapid development of economic and overall political cooperation between the European Union and Russia, and their (common) of geopolitical emancipation. The highlight of that process was the construction of Nord Stream 1, which the then Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Angela Merkel officially opened, with hugs and smiles. In Washington, the said outcome was not greeted with the same emotions.

In the same year 2007, the then German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote: “Russia is an irreplaceable partner of strategic importance for the EU. A pan-European peace order and a permanent solution to important security problems, from the Balkans to the Middle East, can only be achieved with Russia, by no means without it or against it.”

When Lajčak imposed his amendments in 2007, the Russian Embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for the first time since Dayton, rebelled at the session of the Council for the Implementation of Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the body that oversees the work of the OHR, against Western countries, and sided with the authorities. Republika Srpska.

In the end, Javier Solana, then European Commissioner for Foreign Policy, called Lajčak by phone and ordered him to cancel the amendments, which he did.

Today, 17 years later, the geopolitical situation in Europe is, as Dodik himself pointed out, structurally different. The higher geopolitical purpose of the war in Ukraine is the interruption of European-Russian economic and political cooperation. Due to damaged relations with Russia, as Dodik notes, the European Union has once again returned under the auspices of the USA.

The aforementioned geopolitical turn was not fully reflected in the relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

We saw that, as in the good old days, the EU Delegation in Sarajevo and the Russian Embassy issued statements against the technical changes to the Election Law.

However, something happened that has never happened before: two extremely important members of the European Union, Germany and the Netherlands, issued special statements in which, contrary to the position of the EU Delegation, they supported the move of the OHR, and aligned themselves with the United States and the United Kingdom.

It represents an unprecedented blow to the EU Delegation and its head, Johann Sattler, who decided to come out against the OHR.

In addition to the above, there is another important difference between the current crisis and the previous one.

I was in the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2019 when there was a crisis related to the sending of the ANP to the headquarters of the NATO alliance.

The crisis occurred due to the collision of political demands, on the one hand, by BiH Presidency members Šefik Džaferović and Željko Komšić to adopt the ANP and send it to the NATO headquarters; and Milorad Dodik, on the other hand, who was against it. The international community, including the US, then acted as a mediator, not as a party to the conflict, and helped to reach a compromise in the form of the Reform Program.

After that, an even bigger crisis followed in late 2021 and early 2022, when the then High Representative Valentin Inzko imposed the Law on the Prohibition of Genocide Denial. It is not a secret that he did so, with opposition from Western countries, including the US, the UK and the EU. After that, the great powers again tried to stop the crisis that was “started by someone else”. In the end, the crisis subsided as the judicial institutions decided not to enforce Inzko’s law.

This time, the situation is radically different.

Schmidt did not act, despite the Americans, British, Germans and Dutch. On the contrary, he imposed the law at their insistence.

In other words, unlike the previous two, the Americans and their allies consciously poked a finger in Dodik’s eye, they entered into a confrontation with him in a targeted manner.

Or as Dodik said at the session of the NSRS: the Western bloc carried out its will, despite threats from the RS.

The third reason why the current crisis is different from previous ones is — money.

Banks in Republika Srpska have closed the accounts of persons and companies that are on the American blacklist.

RS Finance Minister Zora Vidović said that the banks had no choice, because, otherwise, their SWIFT codes and correspondence with other banks would have been shut down, thus the banks themselves would have been kicked out of the international financial system.

“This means the destruction of the entire economic system of the RS, which no one can allow,” she said.

The Prime Minister of the RS, Radovan Višković, said that the Americans “according to all procedures have no right to what they are doing, but ‘the oppressor does not pray to God’”.

He also added that Republika Srpska “cannot oppose their force”, and that they are doing all this, “because they were slapped in other places”.

Nebojša Vukanović, one of the leaders of the Serbian opposition, gave a similar assessment, telling the authorities: “You have put us on the radar of world geopolitics, where the great powers are fighting.

Due to unreasonable personal reasons, you brought the whole of Serbia and the Serbian people into turbulence.”

I don’t know how the current crisis in BiH will end, but there are good reasons to conclude that the Americans, after a long time, started a decisive showdown with the RS authorities. Not because they listened to the voice of Sarajevo politicians and analysts, but as Vučić, Dodik and other Serbian officials note — because of the poor position of the Ukrainians.

A few days ago, the French president said that he would send French troops to Ukraine if the Russians attack Kiev and Odesa. This is a completely direct admission by a well-informed man that Ukrainians are not doing well. Last year at this time, the Ukrainians were preparing a counter-offensive, and hoped to liberate the occupied territory. Today, after the fall of Bahmut and Avdivka, there is talk of the possible fall of Kiev.

After two years of war, despite the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians, Russian supremacy in artillery, aviation and manpower is beginning to show. Almost no one seriously thinks about the possibility of Ukrainians getting their territory back. The key question is: where will the Russians stop, will 20% of the territory of Ukraine, which they currently hold, be enough for them, or, as John Mearsheimer estimates, will they aim to annex four additional areas, in addition to the four they have already taken, which would mean approx. 40% of Ukraine, including parts of Kyiv, if not all of it.

The possibility of the collapse of Ukraine is already producing a certain sense of panic in Western capitals, where there are increasingly frequent mentions of sending troops from those countries, members of NATO, to help the Ukrainians. The Financial Times states that Putin is preparing a new large-scale offensive at the beginning of the summer. In the event that the Ukrainian defense lines collapse, an unprecedented sense of panic would reign in Europe.

Sharing the stated concern, the Americans and their allies (which do not include the EU Delegation) obviously want to increase the pressure on the authorities of Republika Srpska, in order to send them a message that, even if there is a Russian breakthrough in Ukraine, this part of the continent remains a zone of American influence, and Washington, to use Dodik’s own words, will settle accounts with anyone who opposes them or whom they think could oppose them.