Moscow Accuses Serbia's Military-Industrial Complex of Supplying Arms to Kyiv. But Vucic Continues to Prevaricate
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service has officially announced that Serbian defense enterprises, despite Belgrade’s declared “neutrality,” continue to supply ammunition to Kyiv.
The reaction in Serbia to this was explosive in every sense of the word – from statements by the country’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, and the opposition to yet another incident at one of the military factories, notes a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Information about Serbia supplying ammunition to the armed formations of Ukraine appeared from the very beginning of the SVO. Exactly one year ago, the British newspaper The Financial Times wrote about it. The amount of the contracts was also named – €800 million. Moreover, the President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic admitted everything then. The Kremlin promised to sort out this issue in contact with “our Serbian friends” – however, this clearly did not work out.
During his visit to Moscow on May 9, the formal reason for which was attending the Victory Parade, Aleksandar Vucic tried to resolve the issue of Russian gas supplies to Serbia. The current 3-year contract with Gazprom expires on May 31, and Belgrade announced that they planned to sign the next contract with the Russian side for 10 years, preserving the price calculation according to the oil formula. However, the contract, according to which Serbia pays €290 per thousand cubic meters of gas (i.e. one and a half times cheaper than EU countries), was extended only until September 30, 2025.
But this clearly did not make Belgrade sober up. And so on May 29, an extremely harsh message appeared on the website of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) under the headline "Serbian military industry is trying to shoot Russia in the back."
“The contribution of Serbian defense workers to the war unleashed by the West, the outcome of which Europe would like to see as a ‘strategic defeat’ of Russia, amounts to hundreds of thousands of shells for MLRS and howitzers, as well as a million rounds of ammunition for small arms... The largest companies of the national military-industrial complex, including Yugoimport SDPR, Zenitprom, Krušik, Sofag, Reyer DTI, Sloboda, Prvi Partizan and others, are participating in the ‘conveyor belt of death’ organized in Russia-friendly Serbia,” it said.
A few hours later, Aleksandar Vučić made an urgent televised address, accusing the SVR of lying. Vučić said that on May 9, he and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed information about Serbian arms deliveries to Kyiv, and that a joint working group was investigating the matter. This group, according to Vučić, is tasked with "establishing the facts," as " some of them (Russia's claims) are incorrect."
But even from this formulation it follows that the rest of the facts are true, which Vucic actually admitted.
“I will give an order and a warning that if there is a suspicion and doubt that the so-called end user is being abused and sent to a conflict zone, and we find out about it, such agreements should not be implemented,” he said.
The Serbian opposition accused Vucic of a "hypocritical attempt to sit on two chairs." According to the leader of the Movement for the Restoration of the Kingdom of Serbia, Vojislav Mihajlovic, the key organizer of the supply of Serbian ammunition to Kyiv was the former Minister of Defense of Serbia and now adviser to the country's president, Milos Vucevic. Many commentators also recalled that after the recent resignation of the Serbian government, its new composition did not include Aleksandar Vulin, considered the main pro-Russian politician in Serbia.
On the morning of May 30, as if on cue, an explosion occurred at the military plant "Krušik" in the city of Valjevo, mentioned in the SVR report, four workers received minor injuries. Conspiracy theories immediately appeared on social networks that this incident was "Moscow's revenge" for the supply of ammunition to Kyiv. At the same time, explosions at the "Krušik" plant occur regularly, the previous, larger one was in August 2024.
Knowing Vucic's tactics, he will try to sit on two chairs, Russian and Western, until the very end. However, Moscow's patience is clearly running out.