Russian influence and disinformation operations in the Balkans

On 9 January 2023, a military-style parade rolled through East Sarajevo to mark the “Day of Republika Srpska,” a holiday the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has ruled unconstitutional. Around 2,000 Bosnian Serb police officers marched. So did the Night Wolves, the Kremlin-funded Russian motorcycle club sanctioned by the United States since 2014 for its role in the occupation of Crimea. An announcer praised their mission: to “promote Orthodox Christianity and make the Republika Srpska as mighty and eternal as Mother Russia.” Bosnian intelligence later confirmed that members of the Wagner mercenary group and the Ravnogorski Chetnik movement attended the celebrations, where flags of the so-called “People’s Republic of Donetsk” were displayed.¹

None of that assembled itself.

The bikers, the flags, the talk of brotherhood, the local officials on the reviewing stand: each is a component of a system Russia has spent two decades building in the Western Balkans. This research maps that system: the ground it stands on, the rails it runs on (narratives, clients, media), and what it produces in public opinion, elections, policy, and the region’s path toward the European Union. It closes with what counters it, which is not what is usually recommended.

About this edition. This research was first published, under peer review, in the Georgetown Security Studies Review, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 2024), pp. 65–85, co-authored by Vibor Cipan (lead author) and David Kirichenko. The Balkans did not stand still after publication: Milorad Dodik was convicted and banned from office, RT Balkan got its television channel, the United States lifted sanctions on Dodik, and Serbia entered its deepest political crisis since the Milošević era. This is the authors’ revised and updated web edition, current to July 2026; the changes are summarized at the end.

Why the ground is receptive

The Balkans sit on one of Europe’s oldest civilizational seams, and the seam still organizes the region’s politics. Croatia and Slovenia aligned with the West early and durably: the Croats accepted Western Christianity in the early medieval period, and Rome recognized Duke Branimir’s Croatia in 879. Eleven centuries later the same two countries are members of the European Union, NATO, the Eurozone, and Schengen.² Serbia and Montenegro inherited the other side of the seam: Orthodox Christianity, the Cyrillic script, and a long habit of looking east for patronage.³

Centuries of Ottoman rule reshaped the religious composition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, leaving it the mixed Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic society it remains. Ottoman decline brought Austro-Hungarian expansion into conflict with a Russian-backed independent Serbia, and the region supplied the sparks for the Balkan Wars and the First World War.⁴

After 1945, Tito’s Yugoslavia balanced between the blocs and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, developing its industry and living standards faster than most socialist states.⁵ It still could not suppress the national questions underneath. When the federation broke apart in the 1990s, the Yugoslav People’s Army attacked Slovenia briefly, then Croatia, where the Homeland War devastated Vukovar and shelled Dubrovnik, and then Bosnia. The Bosnian war, marked by ethnic cleansing and the Srebrenica genocide of more than 8,000 Bosniaks, was the deadliest European conflict between 1945 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.⁶ The Dayton settlement froze Bosnia into two entities, Republika Srpska and the Bosniak-Croat Federation, plus the Brčko District. The structure preserved peace by institutionalizing the divide.⁷ Kosovo followed at the decade’s end: Serbian repression, NATO intervention, the 1999 bombing of Serbia that remains a foundational grievance in Serbian political memory, and a 2008 declaration of independence that Serbia and several other states still do not recognize.⁸

That history produces today’s map. Most of the region is in NATO, some of it in the EU, and Serbia, officially neutral and practically leaning toward Moscow, sits at the center of the space in between. Russian influence operates in that space.

What Moscow wants

As the EU and NATO absorbed most of Central and Eastern Europe, the Western Balkans became a frontier: the last European region where East and West still visibly compete for alignment.⁹ Russia’s interest is not sentimental. Keeping the region unsettled serves three purposes at once: it blocks or slows the completion of Euro-Atlantic integration, ties down Western diplomatic attention and resources, and maintains a pressure point Russia can squeeze whenever it needs leverage elsewhere. Since 2022 that has meant, above all, Ukraine.¹⁰

The doctrine behind this is usually filed under the name of Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff. But the canonical text is Gerasimov’s 2013 article on the blurring line between war and peace, and “the Gerasimov doctrine” is a name Western commentary attached to it afterwards, a shorthand its own popularizer later called misleading.¹¹ The substance still matters. Gerasimov argued that the informational dimension would move from supporting warfare to constituting it, with information technology “becoming one of the most promising types of weapons,” and his March 2019 address to the Russian Academy of Military Sciences reaffirmed non-military means as central to strategic competition.¹² Under Putin, the practice looks less like a doctrine and more like opportunism with a doctrine’s vocabulary: create and exploit disorder, probe for openings, and treat every local grievance as a potential instrument.¹³

In the Western Balkans, that practice runs on three rails: narratives, clients, and media.

The machinery

Soft-power narratives

Russia’s primary narrative in the region is civilizational: Orthodox brotherhood, pan-Slavic solidarity, and the framing of European integration as moral decadence imposed from outside. The Russian Orthodox Church supplies much of the vocabulary, and the message lands where Orthodox identity and the historical memory of Western intervention give it resonance: in Serbia, in Montenegro, and in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska.¹⁴

The second narrative is Kosovo. Russia positions itself as the defender of Serbian interests on “the Serb question,” vetoing recognition at the UN and amplifying every crisis. The utility is mutual: Serbia’s leadership turns to Moscow for backing on Kosovo, and Moscow converts that dependence into standing influence.¹⁵

Political clients

Narratives need carriers, and Russia’s carriers in the region hold real power.

In Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik spent years openly aligning the entity with Moscow: advocating closer ties, opposing NATO, and hosting the symbolic apparatus of Russian nationalism, from the Night Wolves to RS Day. In January 2023 he awarded Vladimir Putin the entity’s highest medal of honor, in absentia, for his “patriotic concern and love” for Republika Srpska.¹⁶ The United States first sanctioned Dodik in 2017 and again in 2022; the United Kingdom followed in April 2022.¹⁷ What has happened to him since is covered below; nothing else in the region changed as much between the two editions.

In Serbia, the pro-Russian orientation ran through the security apparatus itself. Aleksandar Vulin, sanctioned by the US in July 2023 for corruption and for facilitating Russian influence while directing Serbia’s BIA intelligence agency, met Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow in August 2022 and received honors from the Russian Ministry of Defense. He resigned from the BIA in November 2023, citing Western pressure.¹⁸ Serbia and Russia signed a foreign-policy consultation agreement in September 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a gesture of synchronized positions made while the rest of Europe was sanctioning Moscow.¹⁹

In Montenegro, Russian influence survived the country’s NATO accession, which Moscow had tried to prevent; Russian agents were implicated in an attempted coup in 2016.²⁰ It resurfaced in coalition politics: the government formed in October 2023 under Milojko Spajić depended on the pro-Serbian and pro-Russian For the Future of Montenegro bloc, whose leader Andrija Mandić became speaker of parliament.²¹

The media machine

The infrastructure that moves the narratives is concrete and, for the most part, legal.

Russia established a regional base for Sputnik in Belgrade in 2015: web and radio, staffed locally, publishing in Serbian. Sputnik Serbia presents itself not as a conduit of Russian state media but as a Serbian outlet, which makes its framing (the EU as weak, fragmented, and aggressive; integration as a trap) far more digestible locally.²² The language is the force multiplier: Serbian is official in Serbia, co-official in Montenegro, and widely understood in Bosnia, so a single newsroom’s output travels the whole region while reading as domestic.²³

RT followed. Despite the EU ban on RT and Sputnik imposed in March 2022 for their role in justifying the war against Ukraine,²⁴ RT launched its Serbian-language online platform, RT Balkan, in Belgrade in November 2022.²⁵ In the February 2024 original, RT Balkan was “planning” television broadcasting. It is no longer a plan: RT Balkan began 24-hour television broadcasting from Belgrade in late December 2024, distributed through cable operators in Serbia and Republika Srpska.²⁶ Both operations run openly. In 2025–26, when the EU pressed Belgrade to close the offices of Sputnik and RT Balkan as part of accession alignment, Serbia’s information minister rejected the demand as “censorship.”²⁷

A wider structure surrounds the flagship outlets. AidData’s mapping of media ownership in Serbia and Montenegro identifies ownership as a standing entry point for foreign influence through elites and media owners, and the republication of Russian-favorable content by local outlets is a tactic observed across the region.²⁸ In Republika Srpska, the mechanism is political rather than proprietary: the entity’s most influential outlet, RTRS, is close to the RS government, and the government has maintained loyalty through selective public funding and politically motivated legal pressure on critical outlets, a pattern documented since at least 2012.²⁹

The war in Ukraine as accelerant

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 forced every government in the region to show its cards, and it sharpened every dynamic described so far.

In Serbia and Republika Srpska, the invasion strengthened already strong pro-Russian sentiment; Belgrade saw public rallies supporting Russia’s war, and pro-war symbols became a normal sight in the city.³⁰ In the rest of the region it revived the memory of the 1990s. Underneath was the fear that a Russian victory would embolden Serbian nationalists to reopen the outcomes of the wars over Bosnia and Kosovo.³¹ The EU reinforced its EUFOR peacekeeping force in Bosnia with roughly 500 reserve troops the day the invasion began.³²

The war also moved people. More than 300,000 Russian citizens have entered visa-free Serbia since February 2022, though far fewer stayed: roughly 50,000 hold residence permits, and estimates of the community actually living in the country range from about 80,000 to 110,000.³³ The émigré wave is economically visible and politically ambiguous: many left Russia to escape mobilization rather than to oppose the regime. The long-term effect on Serbia’s orientation is an open question.

Serbia’s official posture through it all has been an exercise in strategic ambiguity. President Aleksandar Vučić committed to the European path while refusing, year after year, to join EU sanctions against Russia.³⁴ In May 2022, while the rest of Europe was scrambling away from Russian energy, he secured what he called an “extremely favorable” gas deal with Moscow.³⁵ The European Union, needing Serbia inside its orbit, has mostly responded with accommodation, a conciliatory approach critics call appeasement.³⁶

Since 2024, the hedging has come under strain from both directions:

• Vučić attended Moscow’s Victory Day parade on 9 May 2025 over explicit EU warnings, and a Serbian military unit marched on Red Square.³⁷
• Weeks later, Russia’s foreign intelligence service publicly accused Serbia of “stabbing Moscow in the back” by supplying ammunition to Ukraine through Czech and Bulgarian intermediaries. Vučić halted ammunition exports in June 2025, then reversed course in November, offering to sell ammunition to European buyers who “can do whatever they want with it.”³⁸
• US sanctions on NIS, Serbia’s Gazprom-controlled oil company, took effect in October 2025 and shut the country’s only refinery within weeks; Gazprom agreed to negotiate selling its stake, and Serbia signed only a short-term extension of its Russian gas arrangement.³⁹
• The European Parliament resolved in October 2025 that Serbia’s accession cannot advance without alignment on sanctions.⁴⁰

Meanwhile Serbia’s domestic ground shifted in a way no foreign actor scripted. The collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy on 1 November 2024, which killed 16 people, ignited the largest protest movement since the fall of Milošević: student-led, anti-corruption, and sustained. Prime Minister Miloš Vučević resigned in January 2025. On 27 June 2026, Vučić announced that he would resign the presidency and call early elections; as of this writing he has not yet formally stepped down, and analysts widely expect him to attempt to govern from another seat.⁴¹ Whatever follows, the Vučić era of consolidated, personalized balancing is ending on terms set by domestic accountability politics, not by either geopolitical patron.

The Srebrenica inversion

Since the invasion, the Russian Embassy in Bosnia has used social media to defend Russia’s war and to draw parallels between eastern Ukraine and Srebrenica, recycling a comparison Putin himself made in 2017, when he warned that Ukrainian actions in Donbas could exceed the Srebrenica massacre.⁴² At the same time, Russia has consistently denied the Srebrenica genocide itself. As Harun Karčić, a Sarajevo-based analyst of Russian influence in the region, has documented, the genocide Russia denies at home is the same one it invokes abroad to rationalize its incursions.⁴³ The narrative is a tool, detached from any factual commitment.

James Rubin, then coordinator of the US State Department’s Global Engagement Center, put the regional mechanics plainly:

"The main source of the threat in this part of the world is Russian-generated disinformation, often repeated and acting as a hub through Serbian media platforms and then repeated and promulgated here in the Western Balkans."

The hub-and-spoke structure is the point: content originates with Russian state media, gains local legitimacy through Serbian platforms, and arrives across borders pre-translated and pre-trusted.⁴⁴

In Serbia itself, the predominant source of information about the war is pro-government mainstream media, which in the war’s first phase carried the Russian framing of Ukraine as a Nazi state Russia was liberating. Serbian users were saturated with viral posts about fabricated Nazi symbols among Ukrainian officials and the conspiracy theory of US bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine.⁴⁵ Other staple narratives track the official Russian line: Western sanctions as the EU “shooting itself in the foot,” and Serbia’s inability to sanction Russia because “China and Russia are our only friends.”⁴⁶

What it produces

Influence operations are measured by their outcomes; four are observable here.

Public perception

Despite the European Union being Serbia’s largest donor and investor by a wide margin, polling consistently shows many Serbians believing Russia and China are the country’s primary benefactors.⁴⁷ That gap between economic reality and public belief is not an accident of ignorance; it is the product of a media environment in which Russian-aligned framing dominates coverage of international affairs, with the old civilizational narratives as the amplifier.

Elections

In Montenegro, the political shift after 2020, from a traditionally Western-leaning orientation toward pro-Serbian and pro-Russian leadership, was prepared and accompanied by media narratives casting pro-Russian politicians as defenders of traditional Montenegrin and Serbian Orthodox values.⁴⁸ In Serbia, media monitoring shows government-aligned and Russian-backed outlets presenting pro-Russian politicians as champions of national interest against Western pressure.⁴⁹ The precise electoral weight of that coverage cannot be isolated from the other advantages of incumbency - this is an argued interpretation, not a measured effect - but the direction of the pressure is not in doubt, and the pattern of politicians who align with Russian positions benefiting from favorable coverage recurs across both countries.

Policy

The clearest policy imprint is Serbia’s sustained refusal to join EU sanctions against Russia, a position that isolates it among EU candidate states and that the strong pro-Russian public sentiment - itself partly manufactured - makes domestically rational.⁵⁰ In Republika Srpska, the entity’s blocking stance on NATO echoes the Kremlin’s position and is reinforced by the entity’s Russian-friendly media environment.⁵¹ In both cases the causality runs the same way: disinformation did not create these policies, but it built and maintains the public opinion that makes them cheap for politicians to hold.

Regional stability and EU integration

The strategic effect is drag: sustained distrust toward the EU and NATO slows enlargement, deepens internal divisions in multi-ethnic societies, and gives non-EU actors room to maneuver.⁵² Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the cost: the EU decided in March 2024 to open accession negotiations, but the process has since stalled, with no negotiating framework adopted and no intergovernmental conference held. The Dodik crisis consumed the political year, and the Commission’s 2025 report scored Bosnia’s progress lowest in the Western Balkans.⁵³

Montenegro complicates the story. The same country whose governing coalition includes openly pro-Russian parties has become the EU’s fastest-moving candidate: sixteen of thirty-three negotiating chapters closed by June 2026, with a declared target of concluding negotiations by the end of 2026 and joining in 2028.⁵⁴ Russian influence in Montenegro is real, and it has not been sufficient to stop a determined accession process backed by public opinion and EU-side momentum. Influence buys friction, not vetoes.

Republika Srpska: Dodik after the verdict

The starkest development since publication tests the thesis directly. In February 2025, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina convicted Milorad Dodik of defying the decisions of the international High Representative, sentencing him to one year in prison, later commuted to a fine, and banning him from the RS presidency for six years. The verdict was confirmed on appeal in August 2025; the Central Election Commission revoked his mandate; the Constitutional Court rejected his final domestic appeal in November.⁵⁵ The crisis triggered another EUFOR reinforcement: roughly 400 additional troops in March 2025, bringing the force to about 1,500.⁵⁶

Then came the twist. In October 2025, the United States lifted its sanctions on Dodik and dozens of associated persons and entities, following RS de-escalation steps and lobbying directed at the new US administration. The reversal undid nearly nine years of American policy toward him.⁵⁷ In the snap election for his vacated seat, Dodik’s hand-picked candidate Siniša Karan won narrowly, a result confirmed in a partial repeat vote in February 2026.⁵⁸ Dodik remains president of his party, SNSD, and, as Balkan Insight put it, the new president is in office while “the old one’s still in control.”⁵⁹

For Moscow’s purposes, the episode cuts both ways. Its most reliable client in the region lost his office and his ability to stand in the October 2026 elections. But the network he built absorbed the blow, and the Western front against him cracked. The influence infrastructure proved more durable than the individual, which is what infrastructure is for.

What counters it, and what only appears to

The counter-disinformation literature converges on two prescriptions: regulatory frameworks and media literacy. Both matter, and neither works the way the standard recommendations imply; this region shows why.

Regulation, and its jurisdictional limits

The EU’s own analysis is the right starting point. A study commissioned by the European Parliament’s foreign-affairs committee concluded that disinformation in the Western Balkans is not the root cause but a symptom of poor governance, geopolitical exposure, and deep internal enmities, and that the effective policy responses lie less in the media and security domains than in governance, public engagement, and diplomacy.⁶⁰ The EUvsDisinfo initiative’s regional work reaches the same structural conclusion.⁶¹

The EU’s regulatory instruments have hardened since early 2024. The 2018 Code of Practice on Disinformation and its 2022 Strengthened successor⁶² were voluntary self-regulation, and their assessed weaknesses (undefined key concepts, missing performance indicators) reflected that. In February 2025 the Code was formally integrated into the Digital Services Act framework as the Code of Conduct on Disinformation, effective 1 July 2025: for the largest platforms, adherence to its commitments on demonetization, political advertising, and fact-checking now counts as an auditable risk-mitigation benchmark rather than a promise.⁶³ That is a real improvement, with two limits. X, one of the region’s most consequential platforms for viral disinformation, withdrew from the Code in 2023. And the DSA binds platforms, not governments: none of it reaches RTRS’s relationship with the RS government, Serbia’s tabloid ecosystem, or a cable package carrying RT Balkan.

Behind that limit is the real problem with regulatory prescriptions for this region: regulation assumes a good-faith regulator. In Serbia and Republika Srpska, the state is not a neutral referee facing disinformation from outside; the governing apparatus is itself the largest amplifier of the narratives in question, funds the loyal outlets, and harasses the critical ones. Recommending that such governments implement EU-style disinformation frameworks is recommending that the operator of the machine regulate the machine. Adaptation of the EU acquis through the accession process⁶⁴ remains the one regulatory channel with real force: it attaches conditions to something these governments want instead of relying on their goodwill.

Media literacy, and its trust prerequisite

Finland is the standard citation, and deservedly: media education across all levels of schooling, broad institutional participation, and a top ranking on the European Media Literacy Index.⁶⁵ But Finland’s model rests on a prerequisite the citation usually omits: high public trust in institutions, schools, and independent public media. Media literacy education works when the school and the public broadcaster are themselves trusted. In societies where institutional trust is low and the public broadcaster is a party instrument, “critical thinking about media” can just as easily turn into generalized cynicism: distrust of everything, which serves the disinformer fine. Adapting Finnish-style programs to the Balkans is therefore a sequencing problem, not a translation problem. Partnership-driven programs through schools, NGOs, and communities are worth building,⁶⁶ but they are a decade-scale investment that depends on the governance improvements the EU study identified, not a substitute for them.

What that leaves

Stripped of the boilerplate, the levers that plausibly move outcomes in this region are: EU accession conditionality applied without the appeasement discount; sustained funding and protection for the independent local journalism that contests these narratives; transparency of media ownership, where AidData’s mapping shows the entry points; and the unglamorous work of governance reform that removes the grievances disinformation feeds on. None of this is quick, and the interested parties will resist every step: Moscow above all, but also the local incumbents whose power the ambiguity sustains.

Where this leaves the region

Viewed from mid-2026, the picture has moved a long way from the one we described in early 2024, and the direction of the movement is itself evidence.

Russia’s investment in the Western Balkans has not purchased control. Its main client is banned from office, reduced to governing through a proxy, and dependent on an American policy reversal for relief. Serbia’s balancing president announced his own exit under pressure from a domestic accountability movement that no foreign narrative created or could redirect. Montenegro is moving fast toward EU membership with pro-Russian parties inside its governing coalition. Influence, again, buys friction rather than vetoes.

But friction was always the product. The operation costs little, lasts, and speaks the region’s own language; it lives inside local media and local politics rather than arriving from outside. It has no victory condition. What it needs is a region whose European future stays contested, whose societies keep distrusting their institutions and each other, and where a crisis is always on hand when Moscow wants one. The returns compound quietly, in years of delayed enlargement, in elections fought over identity instead of governance, in young people who emigrate because the ambiguity offered nothing worth staying for.

The conclusion we reached in 2024 stands, sharpened: treating disinformation as the disease mistakes the symptom for the cause. The disease is the combination of unresolved governance and elites for whom ambiguity is a business model. Moscow supplies the narratives; the demand side is local. Any serious Western strategy has to work both sides of that market. The two years since publication suggest the region’s own societies, from Belgrade’s streets to Podgorica’s negotiating chapters, are currently doing more of that work than the strategies written for them.

About this research

This piece is the authors’ revised and updated edition of research first published, under peer review, as: Vibor Cipan and David Kirichenko, “Russian Influence and Disinformation Operations in the Balkans,” Georgetown Security Studies Review, Volume 11, Issue 2 (February 2024), pp. 65–85; the original is archived in DigitalGeorgetown. Vibor Cipan is the lead author. David Kirichenko is a researcher on Eastern Europe whose analysis appears in publications including the Center for European Policy Analysis, the Atlantic Council, and The Hill.

What changed in this edition. The argument, structure, and evidence of the original are preserved; the prose has been rewritten for this publication. Factual updates, each verified against primary reporting in July 2026: Dodik’s conviction, removal from office, and replacement by his hand-picked successor Siniša Karan, alongside the US sanctions reversal; RT Balkan’s television launch; Vulin’s exit from government; corrected figures for the Russian émigré population in Serbia; Serbia’s 2025–26 balancing record (Victory Day parade, ammunition exports, NIS sanctions) and the protest movement through Vučić’s June 2026 resignation announcement; Montenegro’s accession acceleration; the EUFOR reinforcement of March 2025; and the EU Code of Practice’s conversion into the DSA Code of Conduct. The assessment of counter-disinformation policy has been substantially rewritten; its conclusions are the authors’ own.