It has everything – blood, conspiracy, crime, cover-ups, the untouchable rich, and their friends in high places. It could be the plot of a suspenseful thriller if a skilled author chose to write it.
Or it could just be a stereotype of a shallow conspiracy theory, dragged across the Internet for years like a faded, torn rag until someone, for the hundredth time, tries to wash it, iron it, and present it as a spectacular discovery.
There is no online user who has not at least once been deceived by fake stories, which have never had a more favorable environment to flourish than in an online space. I include myself here. But there are people to whom this should not happen – professionals who make a living by blocking false stories and communicating the truth.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić recently announced millions in lawsuits against several major European media outlets, mainly British ones, which linked him to the alleged “human safari” affair in Sarajevo in the early 1990s, then under siege by Serbian forces.
Although for years he has explicitly denied the stories – repeated in cycles – that he participated in Serbian combat actions against besieged Sarajevo, today Vučić accuses major European media more vigorously than ever and points out that this will be the first time he calls any media outlet to court. Indeed, why does the never-substantiated and always credibly denied story about a young Vučić with a weapon in the mountains above besieged Sarajevo appear again? And where did his strongest reaction yet come from? The answer lies in the changed context, in which recycling this “affair” may yield a different result for those with a vested interest in its success.
What makes this situation particularly suitable for manipulation is the expectation that the audience will more readily believe a dramatic myth than a dull fact. It is enough to extract old elements from the past, precisely connect things that have never had any connection, and produce a story that appears to be a discovery but actually functions as a smokescreen. This is the environment in which constructions designed not to be convincing but to be provocative are most easily created.
Vučić’s opponents in Serbia are certainly interested in discrediting and weakening him, given that they have been protesting against him and his government in the streets for a year. But even they dismiss with disdain the repeated rumors about the Serbian president that have been picked up by outlets such as The Guardian, Daily Mail, and The Telegraph. “Insane accusations against a man who has to answer a whole series of meaningful accusations in the end always serve to verbally encourage regional adventurers, ‘journalists’, and activists. And for him to be right, at least once,” writes the liberal Belgrade weekly “Vreme”, which is strongly opposed to Vučić.
There is someone else who is genuinely interested in the fastest and most damaging discrediting of Vučić and who, unlike the Serbian opposition, is truly equipped to carry out such an operation: the Kremlin.
This is an old Russian game. Its essence is not to offer a believable story but to create an atmosphere in which even a completely improbable construction becomes a topic of discussion. Moscow never tries to prove anything. Instead, it seeks to fill the public space with doubt, to make it so polluted that no one dares to separate truth from lies anymore. When everything is relativized, the loudest version becomes dominant. When the space is blurred, the accusation itself becomes sufficient proof. This is a technique Moscow has used for years to compensate for its loss of influence by creating chaos.
Russia’s role should be understood within this framework. The Kremlin is most dangerous when losing, as it shifts from instruments of power to instruments of chaos. These are moments when Moscow is not trying to shape the narrative but to destroy the ground on which narratives are created in the first place. Repeating an insinuation enough times leaves everyone dealing with the insinuation rather than the fact. This is old-school Russian covert operations, and it works just as well today as it did fifty years ago.
Currently, Moscow is losing its last and most important lever of influence in the largest Balkan country. Under the pressure of American sanctions, ownership of the Serbian oil company NIS, which for almost 20 years has served as the main financial and logistical hub for supporting Russia’s anti-Western operations in Serbia and the Balkans, is irretrievably slipping out of its hands.
Faced with a turning point and the loss of its main support in Serbia, Moscow is trying to inflict as much damage as possible while retreating. The discrediting of Vučić, a key political figure in Serbia, is the central element of this destructive strategy.
We will therefore attempt to reconstruct the possible development of this new Russian strategy against the Serbian president, similar to profiling a suspect in a thriller.
It is important to understand that recycling old crimes under new names is a standard pattern in Russian operational practice. The goal is not to strike a precise target but to release a poison that spreads regardless of its carriers. In such campaigns, Moscow relies on the sluggishness of institutions and the frivolity of the media, which often publish stories that fit stereotypes, even when they lack basic factual support. This creates an environment where lies always arrive before the truth.
The context for planting a discrediting story is already very favorable. Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the bloody four-year war in Bosnia. As a result, European media have rekindled their audience’s interest in the somewhat forgotten Bosnia, making any “upgrade” on that foundation quite effective. Just a few days before the 30th anniversary of the end of the war, an Italian journalist asked the prosecutor’s office in Milan to investigate the alleged “human safari” in which wealthy and bloodthirsty extremists paid large sums of money to the Serbian Army for the permission to shoot civilians in the Bosnian capital from the mountains around Sarajevo. However, this is still far from implicating Vučić. Domagoj Margetić, a Croat presented by the British media (Daily Mail) as an investigative journalist but known in the Balkans as an unreliable manipulator and conspiracy theorist, tried to link Bosnian crimes to the Serbian president. This figure, prominent on obscure, extremely pro-Russian Serbian internet channels, joined the “lawsuit” in Milan, inserting Vučić into the otherwise shaky “human safari” story.
Why would this not be at least a good starting point for discrediting the Serbian president at a time when Russia’s largest economic – and even more so, political – propaganda and intelligence investment in Serbia is permanently slipping from Moscow’s control?
This pattern of layering one fake story over another, one false narrative over another, is a Russian specialty, although it has not been patented in Serbia until now.
The American Lansing Institute examined the parallels between Serbia and Armenia and found many similarities in the pattern of Russian actions against leaders who have shown signs of turning away from Russia.
Against both Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Serbian President Vučić, Moscow is taking similar measures to thwart their policies of distancing themselves from Russian influence and moving closer to Europe. “The degree is different, but the method is the same: Russia treats any autonomous foreign policy line in its ‘sphere of influence’ not as normal state behavior, but as treason deserving exemplary punishment.”
In Pashinyan’s case, the trigger was his geopolitical shift away from Russia and toward the EU; in Vučić’s case, it was Serbian arms exports to Ukraine, as noted by the Lansing Institute in its analysis, “How the Kremlin Weaponizes Old War Crimes to Discipline Today’s ‘Disloyal’ Allies.”
The regime, confronted with a mountain of well-documented war crimes committed in Ukraine, is now conducting a smear campaign in a completely different arena, where it is losing its historical foothold and influence.
At the same time, it uses old war crimes as a “weapon”, attempting to implicate new actors who have no connection to those crimes. This “photo-montage”, reminiscent of the infamous erasure of Vyacheslav Molotov from photographs with Stalin, is easily exposed as a poor forgery and deserves only ridicule.
But the masters of deception in Moscow will not give up because of this. They are encouraged by some of the most respected European and British media, which, without basic verification, will side with proven charlatans, fraudsters, and manipulators, thus swallowing the poisonous meal prepared in Moscow’s propaganda kitchen.