For a long time now, it has not only been the rain that circles around Kragujevac. Infrastructure projects, especially motorways, have bypassed it even more. Although it has been one of Serbia’s most important industrial centres for almost two centuries,
Kragujevac cannot be reached by a single modern road built in the past 80 years. The capital of Šumadija and Serbia’s first capital has been consistently bypassed by the Brotherhood and Unity Motorway, Corridors 10 and 11, and even the Morava Corridor, which has yet to be completed.
Remarkably, even the Šumadija Corridor (also called Vožd Karađorđe), whose construction, if President Aleksandar Vučić’s latest promise is to be believed, should begin in July or August, will miss Kragujevac by as much as 30 kilometres. And it will come at a hefty cost, because “generosity knows no bounds” – especially when spending other people’s money.
It seems that Vučić himself has forgotten that back in December 2019, while presenting the “Serbia 2025” plan, he stated that Vožd Karađorđe was a key component of it and that “€100 million had already been secured” for the project.
How Zorana Mihajlović shattered the hopes of Kragujevac residents
To make the irony even greater, the first road in Serbia to be surfaced with asphalt was the route from Belgrade to Kragujevac, nearly a century ago, in 1928. The late and distinguished Kragujevac urban planner Veroljub Trifunović explained that roads once connected major economic and administrative centres, whereas in recent decades the part of Šumadija surrounding Kragujevac has been infrastructurally marginalised.
By the end of the previous decade, it had become clear that neither the motorway nor the expressway intended to connect Kragujevac with Corridor 10 would be built, nor would the Southern Bypass. The only remaining hope was that the Šumadija Corridor would “hit” Kragujevac and restore it to the transport map of Serbia, the Balkans, and Europe. It turned out that this too was merely a pipe dream.
The person tasked with waking people from that dream was the then Minister in charge of infrastructure, Zorana Mihajlović. On 20 August 2019, she announced that Vožd Karađorđe would be between 220 and 270 kilometres long, cost between €1.7 and €2 billion, take the shape of a Y, and connect Corridors 10 and 11. She did not mention Kragujevac at all, though she said construction could begin before the end of that year. Her successor, Goran Vesić, later reduced the total length to 163 kilometres and cut the projected cost to €1 billion.
Almost seven years later, on 7 May this year, in Vučić’s presence, a commercial agreement was signed with the Chinese company Shandong for the pre-financing, design, and construction of the first phase of the 83-kilometre-long Vožd Karađorđe expressway. Under this €1.3 billion contract, each kilometre will cost €15.7 million, making it the second most expensive road in Serbia after the Morava Corridor, whose construction has already “lightened” the state treasury by €2 billion, or 234.4 billion dinars. The average cost per kilometre of Serbia’s first “digital motorway” has already reached €17.8 million, and it is still unfinished. Radar reveals that in the first five months of 2026 alone, the cost of the Morava Corridor increased by a further €110 million.
The third most expensive road project is the 22-kilometre Northern Bypass around Kragujevac, whose price rose from the initial €265.2 million to €342 million, or €15.5 million per kilometre.
How Kragujevac lost the battle to Čibutkovica and Brajkovac
The cost of road construction projects almost invariably rises dramatically, usually due to “unforeseen circumstances”, for which the authorities provide no accountability to citizens, despite the fact that all major projects are financed through public funds or loans that taxpayers will ultimately repay. This has fuelled growing suspicions that every construction project in Serbia includes an element of personal profiteering. The suspicion is reinforced by the fact that infrastructure projects are carried out under special laws that bypass tenders and public procurement procedures, allowing contracts to be awarded directly to favoured contractors.
For the first phase of Vožd Karađorđe, worth €1.3 billion, the government concluded a commercial agreement with the Chinese company Shandong, which will provide the funds for pre-financing the project and building the road. Such arrangements are generally considered less favourable than those concluded with international financial institutions. Moreover, these agreements carry the unmistakable scent of corruption.
Although he holds no formal responsibility in the matter, Vučić explained in detail on 7 May the route of the first phase of Vožd Karađorđe. According to him, one branch will connect Mali Požarevac, Mladenovac, Orašac, Aranđelovac, and the Belosavci interchange, while the other will run from Čibutkovica through Brajkovac, between Lazarevac and Ljig, again reaching the Belosavci interchange, thereby linking the Miloš Veliki motorway with Corridor 10.
Residents of Kragujevac note with undisguised irony that their city, in today’s Serbia under the Progressive Party, never stood a chance against places such as Čibutkovica, Brajkovac, and Belosavci. It was discarded as an unwanted extra. For that reason, the local branch of the Democratic Party (DS) believes that Vučić has “bestowed a great honour upon the people of Kragujevac, since the new motorway will pass as close as 30 kilometres from the city at its nearest point”.
“Before President Vučić, nobody had ever heard of northern, southern, or western Šumadija, because it has always been a single, unified region in the centre of Serbia, with Kragujevac as its most important city. For Vučić and the SNS, however, it is evidently not important enough. It was apparently more important to build a road from Topola to Rača, which serves nobody and leads nowhere, yet costs a fortune,” the Democrats stated.
Recalling that the University Clinical Centre has been waiting for reconstruction and expansion for 20 years, along with numerous other long-promised but never realised investments and infrastructure projects, the DS asks: “Why do Vučić and the Progressives hate Kragujevac so much?”
Why a section half the originally planned length will be 30% more expensive
Zoran Mladenović, president of the Kragujevac-based Movement for Change and Progress, says that “it is disastrous when one man decides everything in a country and when decisions are made without consulting experts”. He cites Serbia’s new road network as a prime example.
“The decision on the route of this expressway was made in precisely that manner. It is unreasonable, unacceptable, and discriminatory towards all citizens of Kragujevac. It is astonishing that something called the Šumadija Corridor bypasses and marginalises the economic, educational, healthcare, and administrative centre of Šumadija, which has more inhabitants than all the settlements along the route combined,” Mladenović concludes.
Civil engineer Danijel Dašić believes that Vožd Karađorđe is the most appropriate name ever given to a road in Serbia. Above all, because it symbolically recalls the famous expression associated with the leader of the First Serbian Uprising, roughly meaning “here, there and everywhere”, denoting a lack of clear purpose or direction – precisely the principle on which the road bearing his name appears to have been designed.
He points out that the project was originally planned as a motorway but was later downgraded to an expressway. Furthermore, its length was reduced from 220–270 kilometres first to 163 kilometres, and then to 83 plus 42 kilometres, while the completion deadline was pushed back to 2035. In the meantime, Vučić announced that the first 83 kilometres would cost €1.3 billion. Compared with the expressway proposed by Vesić, a section only half as long will be 30 per cent more expensive.
“There is no rational explanation for why the road passes through parts of Šumadija where traffic volumes come nowhere near justifying the construction of such an expensive transport corridor. If experts were consulted and allowed to speak freely, it would be far more cost-effective to renovate the existing regional and local roads and then connect them to the main route through Kragujevac, the largest city in that part of Serbia. Once again, the state has chosen expensive, unfavourable, and lower-quality options from China instead of long-term, economically sound, well-conceived projects for which cheaper financing and EU grants could be obtained,” Dašić argues.
He is far from the only one who believes that both Vožd Karađorđe and the Morava Corridor will soon prove to have been misguided investments.
Unless, of course, their primary purpose was to present the new vožd as “the greatest builder”. And in that case, whatever the cost.
(Radar, 16.06.2026)
https://radar.nova.rs/ekonomija/autoput-vozd-karadorde-kragujevac/