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Aware of the wounds still open from NATO bombing of Serbia more than 20 years ago, Ukraine’s ambassador to Belgrade appeared on Serbian television a few days after Russia began invading and bombing his country, with the hope of arousing sympathy among Serb citizens.
But instead of taking the time to explain Ukraine’s suffering, Ambassador Oleksandr Aleksandrovych faced a barrage of insults and insults from pro-Russian Serbian analysts, and long videos of Russian President Vladimir Putin denouncing Ukraine as a ” nest of Nazis ”.
The show aired on Happy TV, clearly pro-government, lasted three hours, and more than half the time Putin’s statements were shown. Angered by this, the ambassador complained to the producer about the transmission of pro-Kremlin propaganda. But the latter told him not to take it so personally, as Putin “is good in our estimation.”
That the Russian leader, seen by many in the West, including US President Joe Biden, as a war criminal, serves in Serbia as a seductive figure to viewers, is a reminder that the Kremlin still has admirers in Europe.
As Germany, Poland and several other European Union countries show solidarity with Ukraine by waving its flag outside their embassies in Belgrade, a nearby street praises Putin. A mural painted on a wall features an image of the Russian leader next to the word “Brother” written in Serbian.
Part of the allure that seduces Putin here has to do with his image as a strong leader, an attractive role model for President Alexandar Vucic, Serbia’s increasingly authoritarian leader, and Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary’s militant rather than liberal leader.
As they face parliamentary elections this Sunday, Serbian and Hungarian leaders also see Russia as a reliable source of energy to keep voters happy. Polls suggest both will win.
Then there is history, or at least a mythologized version of the past, which in the case of Serbia, presents Russia, as another Slavic and Orthodox Christian nation, as a friend and an unwavering defender of it over the centuries.
But perhaps more important is Putin’s role as an inspiration to nations that, despite their past crimes, see themselves as victims rather than aggressors whose politics and psyche revolve around cults of nurtured victimization. from dissatisfaction and complaints to the West.
Arijan Djan, a psychotherapist from Belgrade, says she is shocked by the lack of empathy among many Serbs about the suffering of Ukrainians. On the other hand she realizes that many of them still carry the scars of past traumas, which dispel any sense of empathy for the pain of others.
“Individuals who suffer from trauma they have never faced can not have empathy for others. Societies, like individuals injured by trauma, relentlessly repeat the same stories of their suffering. “And that erases any of their responsibility for what they have done to others.”
The feeling of victimization in Serbia is very deep. Serbs see the crimes committed by their compatriots during the Balkan wars of the 1990s as a defensive response to the suffering experienced by Serbs, just as Putin presents his bloody occupation of Ukraine as a just attempt to protect persecuted Russians. ethnic, belonging to “Russky Mir, Russian World”.
“Putin’s Russian world is an exact copy of what our nationalists call Greater Serbia,” said Bosko Jaksic, a columnist for a pro-Western newspaper. Both, he added, feed on stories that partly commemorate the injustices of the past, and the erased memories of their sins.
The narrative of casualties is so strong among some in Serbia that the Informer, a tabloid newspaper that often reflects President Vucic’s views, reported last month on Russia’s preparations for the invasion of Ukraine with a headline on the front page, describes Moscow as an innocent victim: “Ukraine attacks Russia!” was written at the top of the first page.
The Serbian government, careful not to burn all bridges of cooperation with the West, but sensitive to the general public sympathy for Russia as another unjust victim, has urged the media to take a more neutral stance, says Zoran Gavrilovic, executive director of “Birodi”, an independent media monitoring organization in Serbia.
“Russia is almost never criticized, but the attacks on Ukraine have diminished,” he added.
The Ukrainian ambassador to Serbia, Aleksandrovych, says he welcomes the change of tone, but he sees Serbs finding it difficult to see beyond their suffering due to the 1999 NATO bombing.
“Because of the trauma of what happened 23 years ago, any bad thing that happens in the world is seen as America’s fault,” he said. Even Hungary, allied with the losing side in both world wars, has an excessive victimization complex, rooted in the loss of large parts of its territory.
Orban has fueled this discontent for years, often aligning himself with Russia and against Ukraine, which controls part of the former Hungarian territory, and has emerged prominently as a protector of ethnic Hungarians living across the country’s border.
In neighboring Serbia, Vucic, interested in avoiding the departure of pro-Russian voters ahead of Sunday’s elections, has opposed the imposition of sanctions on Russia, as well as the suspension of flights between Belgrade and Moscow. However, Serbia voted in favor of a United Nations resolution on March 2 condemning Russia’s occupation.
More than two decades after the end of the wars in the Balkans, many Serbs still deny the war crimes in Srebrenica, where Serb soldiers massacred more than 8,000 Bosniaks in 1995, and those in Kosovo, where brutal Serb persecution of ethnic Albanians caused the 1999 NATO bombing campaign.
Asked if she approved of Putin’s war in Ukraine as she walked along the mural erected in his honor in Belgrade, Milica Zuric, a 25-year-old bank employee, answered the question of why the Western media focuses only on Ukraine’s suffering when “Showed no interest in the pain of Serbs” caused by NATO fighter jets in 1999.
“Nobody cried about what happened to us then,” she said. As most of the world media focused last week on the destruction of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol by Russia, Serbia commemorated the start of the NATO bombing campaign.
On the front pages were published photos of buildings and railway lines destroyed by NATO. “We can not forget. “We know what it means to live under bombardment,” the pro-government tabloid wrote on its front page.
A small group of protesters gathered outside the US embassy in Belgrade, and then joined a much larger pro-Russian demonstration. Protesters waved Russian flags and placards with the letter Z, which has become an emblem of support for the Russian occupation of Ukraine.
Damnjan Knezevic, head of the People’s Patrol, a far-right group that organized the rally, said he felt in solidarity with Russia, as it was portrayed as an aggressor in the West, like Serbia in the 1990s, when he said “Serbia was in the reality is the biggest victim ”.
“Russia has a duty to protect its ethnic compatriots in Ukraine, as Serbia did in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo,” Knezevic added. Meanwhile, Bosko Obradovic, the leader of DVERI, a Serbian conservative party, said he felt sorry for the civilian casualties in Ukraine, but insisted that “NATO has a great responsibility” for their fate.
Predrag Markovic, director of the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, says history served as the foundation of nationality, but when distorted by political agendas, it “always offers the wrong lessons”. The only case of a country in Europe that has fully acknowledged its crimes in the past, he adds, was Germany after World War II. “Everyone else has a history of victimization,” Markovic said. “The Independent”, bota.al
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