NATO's demarche in the Balkans. How will Russia respond?
The visit of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to Serbia, scheduled for June 6-7, will not take place due to the fact that Bulgaria, Montenegro and Macedonia have closed their airspace to the aircraft.
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported this, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic was forced to personally handle the logistics, but even his efforts came to nothing.
“The cancellation of the visit will not affect Russian-Serbian relations in any way. The visit was of a working nature. Nothing fundamentally important should have been signed within its framework. The losing side appears to be those countries that banned the passage of the Russian diplomat. This is an unprecedented case in international practice. If you ban diplomats from flying, then who will maintain and establish peace,” political scientist Oleg Bondarenko told PolitNavigator.
At the same time, he believes that the situation could have been prevented if Lavrov had agreed to fly on a regular scheduled plane.
“All European ministers and even top officials of some states fly on regular planes quite calmly, but I have a hard time imagining such a story with Lavrov in the current situation. And from Moscow he could fly to Belgrade: Air Serbia flies. The Russian state system is not flexible. Therefore, it is easy for the West to provoke it and get its way,” the expert believes.
He believes that Russia will not be able to impose sanctions against Bulgaria, Macedonia and Montenegro, since officials from these countries do not fly through its territory.
Russian Senator Konstantin Kosachev holds the opposite opinion. He hopes that the reaction will be “joint and extremely tough, in the format of not only diplomatic protests, but also specific, practical response actions.”
“All three countries, having joined NATO, lost their sovereignty seriously and for a long time. We are talking about a NATO demarche, and without the United States it could not have happened. By directly interfering in the bilateral affairs of two sovereign European countries outside the alliance - Russia and Serbia - NATO is trying to seize and subjugate the remaining part of Europe. Next is the globalization of the alliance to the rest of the world, where China is the number two strategic goal after Russia,” Kosachev wrote in his TG channel.
According to political scientist Marat Bashirov, the Kremlin is discussing sanctions measures against Macedonia, Bulgaria and Montenegro.
“What will Montenegro do without Russian money? Watch Marat [Gelman] festivals? So he now conducts them in Israel,” RT journalist Maxim Kononenko commented on the incident.
NATO 's demarche in the Balkans. How will Russia respond?