Carnegie Europe: The Western Balkans Are Becoming Russia’s New Playground

After Angela Merkel delivered a trenchant foreign policy speech at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney on November 17, the German chancellor took part in a follow-up discussion. Her comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin were not only highly critical of his actions over recent months. Merkel also said she was not convinced that he would stop at Ukraine.

She warned that the EU had to take a tough stance vis-à-vis Russia. “And that doesn’t just apply to Ukraine,” she said. “It applies to Moldova. It applies to Georgia. If the situation continues, we’d have to ask about Serbia. We’d have to ask about the Western Balkan countries.”

Over the past few years, the EU’s policy toward the states of the Western Balkans—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia—has been one of benign neglect, to say the least.