Published on: 03.10.2026 | Author: Drizan Shala
Kept in Reserve
On Thursday Putin forgave Serbia, said whom he hopes will govern it, and told the Serbs their division is an injustice of the kind that leads to conflict. Set against the war Europe says it must be ready for, his answer describes an option being kept open.
By Drizan Shala | 3 October 2026
On Thursday evening at the Valdai club a historian from Belgrade asked Vladimir Putin about Serbia's neutrality and its election. Volodymyr Zelensky's August visit to Belgrade came up as well, and Putin waved it away. "Girls get embarrassed," he said. "Nothing embarrasses us. We do politics." He welcomed Serbia's "very restrained position" and its refusal of sanctions. He said the West had left the Serbs in different state entities, that they were "a divided people in Europe, divided by force", that this was unjust, and that "every injustice leads to some kind of complications and conflicts". He said he had just seen Milorad Dodik, and that Dayton goes unimplemented while other solutions are imposed on the Serbs. He said he hoped Aleksandar Vučić, president until Sunday, would be Serbia's next prime minister, and that Russia would answer his cooperation in kind.
Putin weighs what he says in public, and this answer was a set of choices. He was handed an occasion to rebuke Belgrade and declined it. In May 2025 his own foreign intelligence service had called Serbian ammunition reaching Ukraine a "stab in the back", and Vučić has since received Zelensky in Belgrade. What Putin praised on Thursday was the thing Serbia has not done, which is to sanction Russia. In the middle of an election campaign he said which Serbian leader he hopes to keep dealing with. The question was about a state. He answered about a people divided among states, and he chose to put the word conflict next to that grievance, with no date and no actor.
Read as Balkan diplomacy, the answer is routine. Read against the war Europe says it must be ready for, it is a different document. NATO's Secretary General has warned twice since June 2025 that Russia could be ready to use military force against the Alliance within five years, and the European Union has set 2030 as its defence readiness horizon. On Thursday Putin spoke to the same dates. European politicians, he said, talk of preparing for war with Russia in 2029 or 2030. Russia, he said, will attack no one, but a direct attack on its territory, Kaliningrad included, would at once raise the question of every weapon it has. His prepared speech called further conflicts in the coming years "highly probable", and he dated the collapse of the old rules to NATO's bombing of Belgrade in 1999. Public Western policy still treats Serbia principally as an accession candidate and a regional partner to be managed. On a war map it is the largest non-NATO military power in the Western Balkans. Six of its eight neighbours are members, the seventh hosts a NATO force, and the eighth contains the Serb entity whose dominant politician Putin had received two days earlier.
In a war with Russia NATO would need its southeast as reliable strategic depth, with secure lines of communication, freedom of movement and no major armed contingency developing inside it. Serbia is the contingency in that space the Alliance cannot delete from its planning assumptions. Belgrade operates Chinese air defence systems and Russian fighters, and exercised both last month. It would not have to attack anyone. A mobilisation exercise, formations moved toward a frontier, a declaration from Republika Srpska or an incident in the north of Kosovo is a regional news item in peacetime. During a war with Russia each one demands surveillance, contingency plans, readiness and political attention that are wanted elsewhere. How much, only the planning staffs can say, and the argument does not depend on the number. Russia does not need Serbia to open a second front. It needs NATO unable to exclude one.
Western capitals keep count of the shells, the visit and the Strategic Dialogue opened with Washington in July, and tend to read each as movement away from Moscow. "We do politics" suggests Moscow counts differently. It separates tactical disobedience from strategic defection. Shells are tactical. A Serbia whose airspace, logistics and services were integrated with NATO would be defection, and nothing of that kind has happened. So Putin can afford to absolve. What matters to him is where Serbia would stand on the day it counted.
On 30 September the Student List, the main challenger in the election of 25 October, wrote into its programme that Serbia will not sanction Russia. On Thursday, hours before Putin spoke, Vučić told a rally the same list would impose sanctions "on the first day". Both sides of an election Vučić himself calls tight are competing for Moscow's trust. Russia's standing among Serbian voters raises the domestic price of any strategic alignment against it, whoever governs. What Putin said about a divided people keeps the question of borders alive as well. By calling the Serbs divided by force, citing Dayton and speaking of solutions imposed on them, he cast the Bosnian settlement as part of the grievance. Kosovo does not need to be named for a Serbian audience to know where else the language travels. Unresolved grievances are options.
Eight days before Valdai, Marco Rubio came out of a meeting with Sergei Lavrov in New York and was asked about Serbia. He said it is "tied up in some issues that are potentially problematic and explosive", and that Washington would deepen its strategic partnership with Belgrade while it manages them. On 15 September Daniel Lawton of the State Department had told Congress that the United States wants to be Serbia's "partner of choice", and that Serbia's Chinese air defence purchases could jeopardise defence cooperation. This may be sound management of Serbia for the present. Putin has now said what he sees inside the explosive issues. What does Washington believe it is managing, and for which environment? If the partnership is strategic, it has to hold in the one case Europe is rearming for. Would Serbia open its airspace to Allied movement, deny its territory to the Russian services, keep its army in barracks?
In his answer on Serbia Putin threatened no one, and nothing he said proves an operational plan. The answer shows what Serbia may do without losing Russia, which leader Moscow hopes to keep, which grievance it will stand behind, and that the grievance comes with the word conflict attached. If NATO and Russia were at war tomorrow, which of them could make use of Serbia faster? Washington calls the ground explosive and proposes to manage it. Putin is keeping it in reserve.