Will Bosnia join EU and NATO, or veer closer to Moscow instead?

Bosnia and Herzegovina has been stuck in limbo once again. A contender for EU and NATO membership, it has not budged on either path despite Brussels swinging the door wide open earlier this year.

Despite the insistence from the international community that the country that saw a devastating ethnic conflict just decades ago can only be stabilised through membership in the two, Russia's increasing presence in the Serb-majority entity of the Republika Srpska (RS) has brought back concerns that the Western Balkan country of some 3.2 million torn between Brussels and Moscow might end up being torn apart as a result.

The debate over the country's stability stoked fears of an escalation that would echo the 1990s conflict commonly thought to be the worst war on European soil since World War II.

In a country dominated by three major south Slavic ethnic groups — Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks — Russia was always seen as a potentially major disruptor, mostly due to its perceived historical and religious links with ethnic Serbs, who are nominally Eastern Orthodox.

Drafted to bring the war to an end in 1995, the US-sponsored Dayton Peace Accords created two main administrative units in Bosnia — the RS, and the Bosniak-Croat majority Federation of BiH.

The two entities were given some autonomy, with an umbrella state-level government with its three-way presidency — with each member representing one of the three main ethnic groups — and a council of ministers overseeing the country's main institutions, including the army, the top judiciary, and tax administration.

The peace agreement also created one of the most complicated political systems in the world, with a dizzying maze of jurisdictions enabling the country’s three main ethnic groups to dominate domestic politics and exert control over key decision-making processes.

Although Bosnia has never turned into a completely stable society, the ability of the three sides to work together again and, at times, reach a consensus led to the belief that the country could find a way to function and move along on its path to EU and NATO membership.

However, years of economic stagnation, an ongoing massive-scale brain drain, and the inability of the country's leaders to find common ground amid escalating nationalist rhetoric have dampened the ordinary people's expectations that their lives will ever be any different.

Despite this, Brussels granted Bosnia candidate status in March, eight years after the country first applied for EU membership — a move experts see as a deterrent against the Kremlin.

The Brussels-Moscow see-saw

In the RS, people are often divided on whether their leadership should turn toward the EU and the West or strengthen its links with Russia instead.

While most Bosnians are keen to see their country join the EU according to all recent polls, outspoken opponents like Milan believe Brussels has little to offer the residents of the RS.

"It is a wrong system. They bring a lot of bad things to my people and my country," he told Euronews.

But there are also those who advocate closer ties with Europe. Arian, another Banja Luka resident, expressed a common desire for the positive, practical matters that EU membership could bring.

"I would like to join the European Union, too, because I would love to go to travel without taking my passport with me," he said.

As for NATO, the president of the RS, Milorad Dodik, has been adamant about his stance. He reiterated once more as recently as this April that the RS and Bosnia will never join the alliance as long as he has any say about it.

Many Serbs in the region still see themselves as victims of the NATO bombing campaign in the 1990s — conducted in response to the Serbian regime of strongman Slobodan Milošević's involvement in a series of wars across the former Yugoslavia, culminating in serious war crimes in Bosnia and later, Kosovo.

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In Russia, they see a friend and an ally who might actually protect their national interests, which they believe are constantly undermined by US- and EU-backed Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats.

Is Russia really all that influential?

The growing links between the RS and Russia in Republika Srpska are undeniable — seen in the fact that Dodik is one of the few European leaders who has visited President Vladimir Putin in Russia several times since Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Some believe that Dodik's resistance to NATO might be coming directly from the Kremlin, which is intent on not allowing the alliance to spread across Europe any further.

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However, in other parts of Bosnia, authorities believe Moscow is not actually as influential as it might seem at first.

"Russia has so many problems of its own, and it doesn't have time to play with some of Bosnia and Herzegovina's issues," Ramo Isak, Minister of Interior Affairs of the FBiH entity, told Euronews.

"Bosnia and Herzegovina is sovereign, and Russia knows it, everyone knows it. The Republika Srpska cannot block affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina at all, nor anyone is asking them anything, and I think the best would be if they would take care of their own economic problems."

Meanwhile, the RS authorities are moving closer to neighbouring Serbia and Belgrade, recently signing a memorandum to bolster cross-border cooperation. Some claim this is meant to strengthen Dodik's push for the RS' independence, which the Dayton Peace Accord strictly prohibits.

Serbia's populist President Aleksandar Vučić called for peace and harmony in the Balkans even as he and the Bosnian Serb separatist leader organised a large nationalist gathering in June that featured calls for "unity" of all Serbs in the region — and the heavily criticised memorandum was a direct result of the event in Belgrade.

However, others are adamant this is not the case: in fact, it's only meant to strengthen Banja Luka's hand internally while reinforcing the relations between the two parts of the Balkans with a Serb majority, Darko Matijašević, former Minister of Interior of the Republika Srpska, told Euronews.

"I am certain that we should be able to reach agreements based on mutual understanding that it is in our national interest to protect the high level of our autonomy here in Bosnia, based on the Dayton Peace Agreement, as you know, and our constitution," Matijašević, who is also the president of the Bosnian offshoot of Vučić's Serb Progressive Party (SNS), concluded.