Vucic condemns Serbs' possible contacts with Wagner Group

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has recalled that the law prohibits Serbs from participating in wars abroad.

He clarified that this applies to any military conflicts, including in Russia or Ukraine, Kommersant reports.

The president evaded the question of whether any of the country's citizens participate in the Russian [private military contractor] Wagner Group.

On December 8, 2022, the Wagner Group opened the Friendship and Cooperation Centre in Serbia. The centre was visited by two local activists - the leader of the People's Patrol movement Damnjan Knezhevich and the representative of the Russian-Serbian Cultural Information Centre and Cooperation "Orly" Zoran Lekic. The media wrote that these activists cooperate with the group.

"We have accepted every person from Russia, Russian as a native language in this country... Then why are you doing this, calling someone from Serbia to Wagner, if you know that this is contrary to our laws?" Vucic said on TV Happy.

He evaded the question of whether there are Wagner members in Serbia. According to him, "there are a lot of irresponsible people".

"I want to say this to everyone, first of all to our Russian friends. We will not go into details, about whether this is an old site or a new one (where they reported on the cooperation of activists with private military contractors.— ed.), whether the information is posted from Moscow or from here, whether it is the website of Wagner or someone else. It is not fair to those who suffer for not 'punishing' Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or someone else and does not delve into whether Gogol is Russian or Ukrainian," the Serbian president said.

The media wrote last fall that the group was recruiting prisoners of Russian colonies to participate in a military operation in Ukraine, and the group's founder Yevgeny Prigozhin personally handled the recruitment. In January, Politico reported that the United States is concerned about the increased activity of the Wagner Group outside Ukraine, including in Serbia. Since 2014, a law has been in force in this country providing for a prison term of six months to 10 years for participation in hostilities or conflicts of third countries and recruiting Serbian citizens.