On the eve of a trip to Russia and negotiations with Vladimir Putin, Serbian President Alexander Vucic had to convene the National Security Council and discuss the incident with a Russian spy bribing an employee of the Serbian special services. The situation is really annoying, ”writes Vitaly Portnikov in a column on Radio Liberty.

In Belgrade, they could still explain the Kremlin’s aggressive attitude towards the president of neighboring Montenegro, Milo Djukanovic. Indeed, Dzhukanovich did not live up to Russian expectations and did not turn his small country into an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of Kremlin geopolitical claims, achieved Montenegro’s entry into NATO and is working on its rapprochement with the European Union. And Vucic remains a loyal ally of Moscow also because his country needs Russia's support on the Kosovo issue.

Serbia is not going to join NATO, it refused to impose sanctions against Russia together with other EU partner countries, it signed a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union, albeit symbolic but important for Russian propaganda, it accepts Putin as emperor, her military department. What else is needed?

A lot needs. In Russia, they definitely do not want to notice where, in fact, Serbia is located, but it seems that no one in the Kremlin is interested. In Russia, Vucic’s foreign policy is perceived as a sophisticated deception, the purpose of which is to lull the vigilance of the Kremlin comrades and the Serbian people and lead fraternal Serbia to the rotten West.

Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma and Viktor Yanukovych also believed that there was nothing criminal in signing the Founding Act on Cooperation with NATO or in seeking to sign an association agreement with the European Union. That they remain “their own” for the Russian political and oligarchic elite, kiss the deripaska and do not think about joining NATO. And in the Kremlin, every step they took to the side was treated as a real betrayal. And it is clear that spying in such an unreliable country is a holy thing, otherwise they will be deceived and will not frown!

But if Vucic does not want to remember such a distant country as Ukraine, let him turn to his own story. Recall that Marshal Josip Broz Tito was a combat associate of Joseph Stalin and a political ally of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. Stalin hated him, and Khrushchev and Brezhnev were with undisguised suspicion simply because they could not command Titan Yugoslavia as the "

It is clear that Soviet espionage in the SFRY was commonplace - from attempts to organize sabotage and assassination during the time of Stalin to recruiting and obtaining secret information during the times of Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Tito simply did not perceive this with surprise and did not ask the Soviet ambassador \? Because he understood: all this is due to the fact that he is the president of a country that is not a colony of the Soviet Union and does not obey the whims of the Kremlin inhabitants.

Vuchich will also not be very difficult to answer the question \? " Because he is the president of Serbia. And no matter how much he talks in the Kremlin about the fraternal friendship of the Russian and Serbian peoples, Serbia will still remain a state with its own interests, a state whose leaders cannot be simply ordered, and at the same time a state that is constantly trying to exchange its words about friendship for specific help. And the leaders of such a state, by definition, cannot be trusted, even if it’s Belarus, not like Serbia.

Therefore, as long as Serbia will exist as a sovereign state, Russian spies will try to bribe its scouts, Russian residents - to obtain information from military facilities, and representatives of cultural centers - to recruit politicians and journalists. And in the place of Vucic, I would not be very annoyed about this and would not torment the Russian ambassador with rhetorical \? After all, a Russian spy with a bundle of banknotes in his bosom is the most accurate proof that Serbia exists, that it has its own interests in this world, that Russia reckons with it. The Kremlin just does not know how to love otherwise.

Reprinted with permission of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.