Geopolitik und Politik

By eadaily.com

Can Serbia join the EU and avoid joining NATO, a military alliance which members are EU countries and that had been bombing Serbia in 1999 for 80 days running? Will Belgrade manage to protect its military sovereignty while being on the way to European integration, the way the other countries of the region are following? What advantages expect Serbia if it is finally granted the long-awaited EU membership and what hardships will the Russian-Serbian relations face in future? Director of the Belgrade-based Center for Geostrategic Studies Dragana Trifkovic answers these and other questions of EADaily.

By eadaily.com

The news that the court of Bosnia and Herzegovina has acquitted Bosnian “brigadier general” Naser Oric despite his crimes against Serbian POWs in Bratunac and Srebrenica has enraged the Bosnian Serbs. According to President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik, this verdict is one more proof that crimes against Serbs remain unpunished. President of Serbia Aleksandar Vucic ironized that the lives of Serbs seem to be not as precious as the lives of people of other nationalities but still urged the Serbs to try to build common future with their neighbors, the Bosnians.

The acquittal of Oric was not a surprise for either Serbian or Russian experts. They are unanimous that it is just one more display of the policy the world community has applied towards the Serbs since the collapse of Yugoslavia. According to Head of the Center for the Study of Modern Balkan Crisis, the Institute of Slavonic Studies, Russia’s Academy of Sciences, Yelena Guskova, the world community was unable to settle the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a result, it decided to form an international tribunal, which has been mostly anti-Serbian ever since. “Encouraged by the United States and the European Union, the Bosnian court has ruled in line with this policy. This is why Dodik has once against appeared with the initiative to conduct a referendum on whether there should be such a court in Bosnia and Herzegovina or not,” Guskova said in an interview to EADaily.

By eadaily.com

Serbian mass media have once again caused a stir in public with the news that the defense ministry plans REGEX-2018 military exercises in Serbia next year. The NATO presence in the country is a painful issue for most Serbians who still remember the Alliance’s aggression of 1999. The defense ministry was the first to respond to mass media reports. In an official statement published on the ministry website on August 9, Minister of Defense Aleksandar Vulin says that REGEX-2018 will not be a “NATO exercise”, but a “regional initiative” launched in 2013. “So far, this regional initiative has been implemented in Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Greece, Jordan, and next year it will be here,” he says in the statement.

Recalling that Serbia is a neutral country, Vulin says, “We will exercise with everyone from whom we can learn something, both with NATO and with CSTO, we will work bilaterally with the US Armed Forces, we will work bilaterally with the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and will learn from everyone we can learn something from.”

By eadaily.com

Although people in Serbia are less and less supporting European integration, “new old” government is setting up a separate ministry to deal with integration issues, Dragana Trifkovic, head of the Belgrade-based Center for Geostrategic Studies told EADaily on June 28. The European community has been experiencing domestic crisis for a number of years already, as even its founding states are leaving it, Trifkovic recalled. Officials in Brussels think Brexit will pave the way for reforms inside the EU and integration of the Balkans, which is a wrong idea, as it may aggravate the crisis inside EU, the expert says.

According to her, the EU is not able to settle even the current problems, so it will hardly manage to cope with new challenges.

The steps Serbia has already taken on the way to Europe have brought no breakthrough in settlement of any of its problems (economy, legislation, freedom of media, anti-corruption measures etc.). Brussels conceals this carefully drawing a false picture of the state of affairs in the country, Dragana Trifkovic says.

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By eadaily.com

Victims of the so-called “Srebrenica massacre” have been commemorated at Potocari Memorial for the 22nd time since July 11, 1995. EADaily talked to Serbian experts to find out what Serbian people think about that painful issue.

All the sides to the Bosnia and Herzegovina war committed war crimes and all they must be brought responsible, says Dragana Trifkovic, head of the Belgrade-based Center for Geostrategic Studies. “In fact, what we see is selective justice of Western forces and their political courts set up to lay the guilt fully on the Serbian people,” the expert says blaming mostly U.S. and UK. Trifkovic recalls that when leaving his post, David Cameron, the former British MP, said Srebrenica will “never be forgotten”.

Concerning the US election and Trump Presidency and his performance, an interview was conducted with Mrs.  Dragna Trifkovic

Trump is (again per FiveThirtyEight) back in last place in approval ratings at this number of days after being sworn in of any President in the polling era.

I last checked in on Donald Trump’s approval numbers when they were rising modestly. They’ve now been retreating, at least by FiveThirtyEight’s estimate, for the last three weeks, and he’s now back down to 37.7 percent approval. Some of this movement could just be random fluctuation, and the exact estimates are different from various poll averagers; RealClearPolitics, for example, has him slightly higher. But the basic story is about the same.

Trump is (again per FiveThirtyEight) back in last place in approval ratings at this number of days after being sworn in of any President in the polling era.

And his “net” approval (subtracting disapproval) has been the worst among those 13 presidents every day of his presidency, and it’s never been particularly close. Currently he’s within a single percentage point of same-day Gerald Ford in approval, but at -18.3, his net approval is 9 percentage points worse than Ford’s, and every other president was in positive territory at this point.

All of that with the more-or-less peace and something very close to prosperity — the two things that generally drive whether US citizens like their Presidents or not.