Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, it has been estimated that 200,000 Russians have arrived in Serbia, and because of their stance against Russian President Vladimir Putin, they face threats and violence from the nationalist right, writes The Guardian.
“Unlike other parts of Europe, Russians do not need a visa to enter Serbia and have largely been welcomed in Belgrade given the historical ties between the two Orthodox Christian countries,” The Guardian states.
The British newspaper also states that Serbia is one of the main destinations chosen by the Russian exiles. One of them is the Russian anti-war activist Ilya Zernov.
“Armed with a brush and a bucket of grey paint, the Russian anti-war activist Ilya Zernov walked through Belgrade until he reached a large mural that said “Death to Ukraine” on the side of an apartment block. As Zernov, 19, started painting over the mural, he said he was cornered by three Serbian men who ordered him to stop. “One of them pulled out a knife … He then punched me in the right ear,” Zernov says, who fled his hometown of Kazan shortly after Vladimir Putin’s troops invaded Ukraine. The attack left him with a perforated eardrum, but Zernov said he was glad he managed to at least partly cover the mural. “As a Russian, I felt it was my responsibility to do something. The graffiti glorified violence,” the Guardian writes.
The newspaper goes on to say:” Belgrade has long performed a delicate balancing act between its EU aspirations on the one hand and its centuries-old ethnic and religious ties with Russia. Vučić has refused to introduce sanctions against Russia for its aggression against Ukraine, while Moscow continues to serve as Serbia’s main ally in opposing the independence of its former province of Kosovo.
Feeling unsafe in Belgrade, Zernov has since left the city for Berlin. Before his departure, he was an active member of the Russian Democratic Society (RDS), an anti-war organisation founded last year to bring like-minded Russians together.”
“There is a graffiti battle on the streets of Belgrade,” said Pyotr Nikitin, the founder of RDS, listing other murals in the city that hail Russian troops in Ukraine and the infamous Wagner mercenary group.
“We paint over pro-war murals, but then new ones spring up,” Nikitin said over lunch at TT Bistro, a recently opened Russian restaurant, adding that he founded RDS shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine when he saw that many fellow countrymen were looking for a way to voice their opposition to it. The group has since organised a series of marches in Belgrade.
The Guardian goes on to say that as RDS’s membership ballooned following Russia’s conscription in September 2022, which saw thousands of Russians flee to Serbia to avoid the draft, the group came to the attention of the Serbian authorities.
“First, we saw an organised media campaign against us,” Nikitin said, referring to negative coverage his organisation got in pro-Vučić tabloids.
Nikitin was subsequently banned by the Serbian police from entering the country in July and the reason was “concerns about national security”.
Nikitin, who has a valid long-term resident’s permit, is married to a Serb and has two children who were born in Serbia, was eventually let into the country after spending a night at the airport. Soon after, Vladimir Volokhonsky, an opposition councillor in St Petersburg who co-founded RDS in Belgrade, had his Serbian residency permit cancelled on similar grounds, ie that he was a national security threat.
Several Serbian far-right politicians also spoke out against the influx of anti-war Russians, who they claimed were trying to destabilise the country.
“It is a real revolution of liberals,” Miša Vacić, the leader of the ultra-nationalistic, pro-Kremlin Serbian Right political party, told Politico magazine last March. “They think they must liberate Serbia from Serbs, from traditional Serbian values,” Vacić added.
Nikitin, who has rejected claims that his organisation was interested in influencing Serbian politics, said the situation got significantly worse by this summer.
The Guardian notes that Nikitin and other Russian activists have said the attacks against them were supervised by Serbia’s intelligence chief, Aleksandar Vulin, who is widely believed to be close to Russian security services.
Serbian media have also reported that Vulin’s Security and Information Agency (BIA) wiretapped a 2021 meeting of Russian opposition members in Belgrade. Vulin allegedly took the recordings of the conversations to Moscow and handed them over to Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council.
“By targeting the leaders of the anti-war movement in Belgrade, the Serbian authorities are trying to force others to stay quiet,” Nikitin said. “It is demoralising when the state works against you. But still, we try to come together and voice our opinions.”
Another Russian anti-war activist living in Serbia who organized anti-war concerts in Belgrade, Yevgeny Irzhansky, was summoned by the Serbian police in July and questioned about his views on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
“Most of the Russian musicians and speakers who are invited are on the blacklist in Russia and most of them live outside of Russia because they could be arrested there,” said Irzhansky, who has since moved to neighbouring Montenegro.
But despite the pressure, many Russians in Belgrade remain defiant. On a recent Sunday, about 5,000 people gathered at the MTS Dvorana arena to listen to Bi-2, a popular Belarusian-Russian rock band that stopped performing back home after its lead singer criticised the war – The Guardian concludes.
(Naslovi.net, The Guardian, 29.10.2023)
Photo credits: Zorana Jevtic/Reuters