Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to Belgrade mattered precisely because, at this moment, it offered Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vučić nothing politically at home.
Serbia is heading towards snap elections, society has long been deeply politically divided, and Russophilia and support for Vladimir Putin remain very strong across a large part of the electorate. A president thinking solely about his own electoral result has no reason, just a few months before the vote, to invite Zelensky to Belgrade, receive him with the highest state honors and reiterate before the Serbian public that Serbia recognizes Ukraine’s territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders.
Vučić’s political opponents will not cross over to his side because of this visit, while some voters who support his government and at the same time openly stand with Putin may see it as a reason for discontent. Zelensky, then, brings him not a single new vote and may cost him some of those he already has, which is why the decision to receive him now deserves a far more serious analysis than the familiar explanation that this is simply another attempt by Belgrade to balance between Moscow and the West.
The easier option
Vučić had a much easier option. He had already met Zelensky, had travelled to Ukraine, Serbia had provided humanitarian and financial assistance, and since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion Belgrade had supported Ukraine’s territorial integrity in international institutions. An official visit by the Ukrainian president to Serbia could, without the slightest damage to bilateral relations, have been arranged several months later, once the elections were over, allowing Vučić to avoid opening one of the most sensitive foreign-policy questions among part of his own electorate precisely when every vote may matter.
He chose otherwise, and while that decision does not mean Serbia has rewritten its entire policy towards Moscow, it does show that in this case Vučić judged Serbia’s interest in developing a serious relationship with Ukraine to outweigh his immediate electoral advantage.
For Serbia, that relationship is far more natural than much of the domestic debate over the war would suggest. Ukraine has not recognized Kosovo’s independence, while Serbia recognizes Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders, including Crimea and all the territories occupied by Russia since 2014. These are not two unrelated diplomatic positions, but two applications of the same principle: the borders of an internationally recognized state cannot be changed by military force.
The principle of territorial integrity
For years, Serbia has built its case before the international community precisely on the UN Charter, territorial integrity and the proposition that might cannot replace international law. It would therefore be politically unserious for Belgrade to expect that principle to apply when Serbia is concerned, only to relativize it when the Russian army occupies Ukrainian territory.
Vučić’s reaffirmation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity during his talks with Zelensky was therefore not a favor to the Ukrainian president, but a consistent defense of one of Serbia’s most important national interests.
Putin’s Russia has brutally trampled that very principle. The war Moscow launched against Ukraine has no defensible basis in international law, nor can it be explained away by Russia’s supposed security interests or some historic dispute with the West. The Russian army crossed the border of a sovereign state, occupied its territory and attempted by military force to decide what government Ukraine would have, what course it would follow and which borders it would be allowed to regard as its own. Putin’s regime has turned systematic attacks on cities, energy infrastructure and civilians into a method of warfare, while millions of Ukrainians have been forced from their homes, entire families have been destroyed, and a generation of children is growing up to the sound of air-raid sirens. For more than four years, the Ukrainian people have been paying a terrible price for refusing to accept that Vladimir Putin has the right to decide the fate of their country.
That is why Zelensky’s visit to Serbia carries more political weight than another trip to a capital where support for Ukraine is part of the political consensus. Serbia is one of the few European countries in which Russia and Putin still enjoy exceptionally strong public support, while for years Russian political and media influence framed the war in a way that suggested Serbia should almost instinctively understand the Russian side.
That view reduced Ukrainians to mere supporting actors in their own tragedy. Zelensky has now come to a society in which Russia’s explanation of the war has long held enormous sway, to speak with Serbia’s president as the leader of a state with which Belgrade wants serious political and economic relations.
How Ukraine established its global standing
Ukraine earned that international standing through its own resistance. At the beginning of 2022, Moscow plainly expected the Ukrainian state to be broken quickly, its political leadership to fall and the world eventually to accept the outcome imposed by Russian force as a fait accompli. The opposite happened: Ukraine’s army preserved the state, its institutions continued to function, the economy endured despite vast destruction, and society displayed a resilience Russia had clearly underestimated. Behind every day of that resistance are families waiting for loved ones at the front, doctors working through air-raid alerts, engineers rebuilding the energy grid after Russian strikes, and millions of citizens who refused to accept another state dictating their future. Their courage has changed Ukraine’s place in Europe more than any diplomatic campaign ever could.
That is why Zelensky can now talk in Belgrade about the time after the war. Free trade, energy, railways, ports, agriculture and the reconstruction of Ukraine are not ceremonial talking points. After the war, Ukraine will be one of the most important states in European security, with immense military experience, a powerful defense sector and reconstruction needs on a scale Europe has not seen for decades. Serbia has companies, engineers, a construction sector, agricultural capacity and industry that can play a serious role in that process. Refusing to develop that relationship for fear of Moscow’s reaction would run directly counter to Serbia’s interests.
No one’s vassal
The relationship between Belgrade and Kyiv should therefore finally be treated as a relationship between two states with interests of their own, not as an appendix to Serbia’s relationship with Russia. In recent years, Moscow has behaved as though close historical ties with Serbia gave it the right to pronounce on how far Belgrade may go in its cooperation with Ukraine, as seen in Russian reactions to Serbia’s defense industry, contacts between Serbian and Ukrainian officials, and other decisions in Belgrade that did not suit the Kremlin. Serbia has no reason whatsoever to accept that expectation. Serbia alone decides, in accordance with its own interests, what relationship it will have with Kyiv, and anything else would amount to voluntarily restricting its own foreign policy to accommodate the wishes of a state that has committed aggression against another European country.
Of course Vučić knows that receiving Zelensky will be welcomed in Brussels. Serbia is a candidate for European Union membership, is economically far more closely bound to the EU than to Russia, and its refusal to align with European sanctions on Moscow has burdened its relationship with the Union for years.
Yet the claim that Zelensky was invited primarily for Brussels does not survive contact with the facts. The two men had met before, Vučić was in Ukraine less than a month ago, and direct communication between Belgrade and Kyiv was no secret – if all he needed was another meeting for the benefit of his European partners, he had plenty of chances to arrange one outside Serbia. What he chose instead was a state visit before the Serbian public, a few months before an election, at a moment when Putin remains an almost untouchable figure for much of the ruling coalition and the broader political right. He knew exactly what that would cost him at home. He could have waited until after the vote, and did not.
For Ukrainians, perhaps the most important point is something else. After more than four years of war, daily deaths, shattered cities and Vladimir Putin’s attempt to strip their country of its right to a future, Ukraine’s president arrived in Belgrade as the president of a state that survived everything that was meant to destroy it. He was received as a partner, the territorial integrity of his country was reaffirmed in his presence, and the talks were about trade, infrastructure, energy and reconstruction. Behind that meeting stands the immense sacrifice of the Ukrainian people, who through their struggle have proved that one state’s borders cannot be determined by another state’s army and that the right to one’s own future is worth defending even at a high price. Serbia, which for decades has invoked those very principles before the world, had to understand this and treat Ukraine in accordance with what it demands for itself.
With this decision, Vučić did something more important than score another foreign-policy success: he preserved Serbia’s honor on an issue where silence, calculation or fear of Moscow’s reaction would have been difficult to defend. He showed that Serbia understands the difference between historical ties with Russia and acquiescence in the policies of Putin’s regime, between maintaining a relationship with a country and supporting its war of conquest, and between Serbia’s interests and Vladimir Putin’s. Serbia has no reason to lose its relationship with Kyiv because of Putin’s aggression, undermine its own argument on territorial integrity or close the door on its place in the future of European security and the reconstruction of Ukraine.
Putin started this war, and Russia will have to bear its political, economic, legal and historical cost. Serbia has no obligation whatsoever to pay any part of that bill on Russia’s behalf, nor to sacrifice its relationship with Ukraine for the Kremlin or allow Moscow to set the limits of its foreign policy. When Putin and those who, with him, conceived, ordered and waged this war one day answer before a court, whether in The Hague or before a tribunal history may remember as a new Nuremberg, Serbia will not have to explain why it stood with the aggressor while Ukraine was being destroyed. Receiving Zelensky in Belgrade showed that Serbia understands where it must stand when the line is finally drawn between those who defended a state’s right to exist and those who tried to destroy it.
By receiving Zelensky now, when doing so will not bring him a single new vote before the elections, Vučić showed that he can recognize the moment when Serbia’s state interest must take precedence over a war and ambitions that are not its own. In this case the choice was clear: to stand behind Ukraine’s right to exist within its borders, to build a serious relationship with a country whose courage has earned the respect of Europe and the world, and to refuse to make Serbia foot the bill for the war of aggression Vladimir Putin began. In doing so, he enabled Serbia to come through one of the defining moral and political conflicts of our time without one day having to justify why it remained silent in the face of aggression. And that is precisely why this decision mattered more to Serbia than it will ever benefit Vučić at the ballot box.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.