Putin: “I hope Vučić will be prime minister of Serbia”

Russian President Vladimir Putin in 1 October expressed hope that Aleksandar Vučić, the lead candidate of the “Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia” list, will become prime minister of Serbia, and said that Vučić shows a desire for cooperation with Russia.

“The current leadership of Serbia and, until recently, the president, and in the future, I hope, also Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, is pursuing a restrained policy, shows a desire for cooperation with Russia, and we, of course, welcome that and will respond in kind,” Putin said at the plenary session of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

The Russian president said Russia highly values Belgrade’s stance in refusing to impose sanctions on Russia.

Speaking about Serbia–Russia relations, Putin said that Serbs have been divided because of “Western intrigues,” and he described this as unfair.

Asked whether he was concerned about the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Belgrade, Putin replied: “That may confuse the girls, while we are dealing with politics.”

The implication of the “girls” joke is that Zelenskyy turning up in Belgrade is theatrical or symbolic and does not change the substance of Russia–Serbia relations, which he had just described as restrained cooperation and Serbia’s refusal to join sanctions.

During his remarks, Putin also spoke about Serbia’s relations with other countries and Belgrade’s international position, saying that Moscow appreciates Serbia’s readiness to pursue an independent policy and to maintain its stance on sanctions against Russia.

“It all started with the bombing of Yugoslavia”

Putin claimed that global tensions will ease “as Western hegemony weakens,” and told the audience that Russia must avoid “catastrophic scenarios.”

“As soon as the USSR collapsed, circles within NATO took that as a signal to exploit the situation and continue dismantling the country. This happened, among other things, on several occasions, despite the promise that the Alliance would not expand,” he said.

He argued that forces oriented toward confrontation with Russia have prevailed in the West.

“It all started with the bombing of Yugoslavia,” Putin warned.

The 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Operation Allied Force, 24 March–10 June) was a 78-day air campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war. It followed the breakdown of talks at Rambouillet and reports of large-scale expulsions and killings of Kosovo Albanians by Yugoslav and Serbian forces under Slobodan Milošević. NATO acted without a UN Security Council mandate – Russia and China opposed one – and struck military targets as well as bridges, power plants, factories, and the state broadcaster in Belgrade. Estimates of civilian deaths range from several hundred to around a thousand; Yugoslav forces then withdrew, and Kosovo came under UN administration and a NATO-led peacekeeping force (KFOR). Kosovo unilaterally declared independence in 2008, which Serbia and Russia still reject.

For Serbia the campaign remains a defining trauma: an attack on a sovereign state that left lasting civilian and economic damage and is widely remembered as illegal aggression. For Russia it became a central exhibit of post-Cold War Western unilateralism – the moment, in Putin’s repeated telling, when NATO began treating the collapse of the USSR as license to expand and to use force outside the UN framework, a grievance he explicitly linked at Valdai to later tensions.

Vučić resigned as president on 27 September 2026, before the end of his second term. Speaker of Parliament Ana Brnabić is acting president. He is heading the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) list “Aleksandar Vučić – United Serbia” in snap parliamentary elections set for 25 October 2026 and is the party’s candidate for prime minister if the list wins. The move has been widely compared to Vladimir Putin’s 2008–2012 switch to the premiership to navigate term limits.

The day before resigning, Vučić spoke with Putin and said he expected an extension of Serbia’s gas arrangement (previously quoted by Vučić at €318 per 1,000 cubic metres versus a much higher market price) and discussed the status of the oil company NIS.

Some Western analysts, including Ivana Stradner, have framed Putin’s open endorsement as political backing ahead of the vote and have raised concerns about Russian influence operations.