Serbia's firefighting diplomacy and the shrinking space between Brussels and Moscow

The fire that consumed more than 3,500 hectares of the Deliblato Sands Special Nature Reserve in early August was an environmental disaster. It was also a small foreign-policy event, and the order in which Belgrade made its phone calls did most of the talking.

A Russian Ilyushin Il-76 heavy firefighting aircraft touched down at Nis airport in southern Serbia and was, according to pro-government outlets, promptly nicknamed the "Russian beast." It was the first foreign aerial asset Serbia had requested. Luka Causic, who heads the Interior Ministry's Department for Emergency Situations, framed the choice in operational terms: "Considering that there are no firefighting aircraft of this capacity available within the European Union, the arriving Russian aircraft will significantly strengthen our capacities to fight the fires," he said.

Only afterwards did Serbia activate the EU's emergency mechanism. Brussels moved four helicopters from the strategic rescEU reserve, based in Czechia, Romania and Slovakia, and dispatched ground firefighting teams from Germany and Romania. President Aleksandar Vucic rejected the idea that calling Moscow first was a political signal. Visiting the Deliblato Sands, he said: "As far as equipment and resources are concerned, we are a European giant. The helicopters we received from Europe to fight the fires are less capable than ours and have a lower carrying capacity than our own."

A fire that doubled as a foreign-policy statement

Whether the sequencing was deliberate or simply reflected who had a heavy water bomber close enough to respond fastest is now beside the point. In a country where pro-government media routinely frame the war in Ukraine as a Western provocation and portray EU sanctions as self-harm, the arrival of a Russian military-derived aircraft is a politically usable image, and the government made sure to use it.

The episode sits awkwardly with Serbia's formal trajectory. Belgrade has been an EU candidate since 2012 and has been negotiating accession since January 2014. The negotiations are organised around 35 chapters, and the European Commission's enlargement strategy treats progressive alignment with the bloc's common foreign and security policy as a condition for closing the chapters at all. Refusing to impose sanctions on Russia, which most EU members tightened sharply after February 2022, is the most visible gap between Belgrade's policy and the EU's, and it has been cited repeatedly by member states sceptical of moving the process forward.

Zelenskyy's Belgrade visit and the Kosovo calculation

The wildfire drama arrived less than two weeks after Volodymyr Zelenskyy made his first official visit to Serbia, an event that on its face looks like a careful piece of balance-of-power diplomacy by Vucic. The two presidents issued a joint statement reaffirming mutual respect for territorial integrity, language that is loaded because Ukraine does not recognise Kosovo's independence. For Belgrade, that single sentence is more valuable than most communiqués, since four EU members plus the United States have recognised Kosovo, and Russia and China have not.

The visit also gave Vucic a line he could take into Brussels: that Serbia is friendly to Ukraine, supplies arms to Kyiv-aligned forces through third parties, and is not, despite appearances, a Russian satellite. Vuk Vuksanovic, a political scientist and foreign-policy lecturer at King's College London who studies Serbia's position between Russia and the West, treats that framing with caution. "Zelenskyy was primarily received so that the ruling coalition could present itself to Europeans as a great friend of Ukraine," he said. "In the same way, Vucic is trying to present himself to the Trump administration as a great friend of Israel, primarily to ensure that neither the European Union nor the United States becomes an opponent of the ruling party during the election campaign."

Moscow reads the visit through a different lens. Vuksanovic argues that the engagement with Kyiv has to be sold in the Kremlin not as a turn away from Russia but as a response to Western pressure and to Serbia's own interests. That is a harder argument to land the longer the war goes on, and harder still if the United States, which under the Trump administration has taken a transactional view of the Western Balkans, chooses to make Serbia's Russia ties a price of entry into its good graces.

Sanctions, alignment and the narrowing choice

The structural problem is that the room for straddling shrinks each time the underlying conflict sharpens. EU candidate status is not a free pass to diverge from the common foreign and security policy; it is a contract to converge on it. Chapter 31 of the accession framework, on common foreign and security policy, requires candidate countries to align progressively with EU positions, including sanctions, and the European Council has used progress in this area as a benchmark for opening or closing negotiating chapters.

Belgrade's refusal to join the sanctions regime is not a technicality. It is the single issue that most clearly distinguishes Serbia's foreign policy from every other EU candidate's. Croatia, Montenegro and Albania have aligned with the sanctions packages adopted after 2014 and again after 2022. North Macedonia has done so under successive governments despite domestic political cost. Serbia alone continues to hold out, and the price for that position is paid in slower accession progress and in quiet exasperation from member states that see sanctions alignment as a basic test of seriousness.

Protests at home, 'colour revolutions' from Moscow

Vucic's balancing act has a domestic component that is harder to manage than the diplomatic one. The student-led protests that began in late 2024, initially triggered by the collapse of a concrete canopy at Novi Sad railway station, have continued to draw large crowds and have shaken the ruling Serbian Progressive Party's assumption that the street belongs to it. Vuksanovic argues that Moscow supports Vucic's framing of those protests as Western-backed "colour revolutions," a vocabulary imported from the post-Soviet space that the Serbian government has adopted wholesale.

That framing serves two purposes. It delegitimises the protesters by association with foreign interference, and it positions Vucic as the defender of national sovereignty against a Brussels-backed opposition. It also has the effect, perhaps unintended, of dragging Serbia's domestic political disputes into the vocabulary of the Russia-Ukraine war. Pro-government media that depict the protests as a Western plot to pull Serbia out of Russia's orbit are not making a neutral observation; they are asking voters to read local grievances through a geopolitical filter.

Why Russia still hedges its support for Vucic

Moscow's backing for Vucic is not unconditional, even if it often looks that way. The Russian government has spent two decades cultivating Serbia as a foothold in the Balkans, a base of opposition to NATO enlargement and to Kosovo's recognition, and a useful irritant for Brussels. A Vucic government is, from Moscow's perspective, a known quantity that delivers most of what Russia wants without forcing Moscow to do anything costly in return.

But Vucic is also the Serbian politician who hosted the Zelenskyy visit and who keeps telling EU leaders that Serbia is not a Russian proxy. Vuksanovic argues that this is precisely why Russia does not fully trust him, even as it relies on him. "Vucic is now trying to make sure that neither the West nor Russia becomes an open opponent during the election campaign," Vuksanovic said. The corollary is that both sides are watching for any sign that Vucic has decided, or been forced, to choose.

What the October election actually decides

The election, tentatively scheduled for October, will not turn on Russia policy. It will turn on the cost of living, on the unresolved question of who was responsible for the Novi Sad canopy collapse, on corruption, on media freedom and on the broader question of whether a country that has been governed by Vucic and his party for more than a decade can credibly continue to call itself a democracy.

But the outcome will define who controls the balancing. A Vucic win would mean continuity, and with it the slow, calibrated approach to the EU that keeps accession talks technically alive without closing chapters, and the maintenance of cordial relations with Moscow without signing up to its war aims. A win for the opposition, or a fragmented parliament that forces a coalition, would create two near-certain consequences: a faster push towards sanctions alignment to please Brussels, and a colder shoulder from Moscow that could include economic and energy pressure.

Neither outcome resolves the underlying squeeze. The war in Ukraine is not going to end on a schedule that suits Belgrade. The EU's alignment requirements are not going to soften. Russia's tolerance for a Serbian government that courts Ukraine and Israel while declining to recognise Crimea and Donbas as Russian is not unlimited. Vucic's room to keep both sides on the hook has been narrowing for two years, and the firefighting decisions of one August week were a small, vivid illustration of how thin that room has become.