October 2, 202012:41
The discovery of Serbian ammunition among Armenian forces in July put Belgrade’s ties with Baku in serious trouble. The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry summoned Serbia’s chargé d’affaires in Baku for a grilling. This episode was bad news for Serbia; Azerbaijan is one of the six countries with which Serbia has a strategic partnership agreement, alongside Russia, China, the UAE, France and Italy.
Over the past 12 years, Serbia and Azerbaijan have supported each other in their respective territorial disputes. Baku has supported the Serbian case on Kosovo, and Belgrade has supported Baku on Nagorno-Karabakh.
Azerbaijan has also provided Serbia with infrastructural credit lines, and an Azerbaijani construction firm, AzVirt, completed the Ljig-Preljina section of the Corridor XI highway in Serbia.
AzVirt will also construct the Ruma-Sabac highway and the Sabac-Loznica expressway, as agreed in 2019. Azerbaijan donated more than 400,000 euros of aid to Serbia during the 2014 floods, and in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, donated medical equipment.
Belgrade was right to be worried about Baku’s reaction to the discovery of Serbian ammunition.
The man behind the arms transfer to Armenia, Slobodan Tesic, is one of Serbia’s largest arms dealers and a financier of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, SNS.
Tesic’s company, Vektura Trans, was supplying Armenia with ammunition manufactured by the Serbian ammunition factory, Krusik.
Last year, both Tesic and Krusik were caught up in a major scandal following claims that several companies owned by Tesic were buying ammunition from Krusik at a discounted price. These mortar shells were then sold to buyers in Saudi Arabia and transferred to Islamist militants in Yemen.
Tesic reached an agreement with Armenia in 2018 the same year that President Vucic visited Azerbaijan to sign the strategic partnership.
Serbia quickly mended ties with Azerbaijan, as Vucic considers his international contacts a significant asset. In early August, he had a telephone conversation with Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev in which he expressed regret over the deaths of the Azerbaijani soldiers.
To repair relations, Vucic promised to send a high-level delegation to Azerbaijan to investigate the matter. He also invited Aliyev to visit Serbia.
However, Belgrade risked angering other geopolitical players engaged in the Caucasus who were then busy elsewhere, but who might not look kindly on the presence of Serbian arms in this unpredictable conflict zone.
One of those players in Russia. Moscow, although the main diplomatic and military backer of Armenia, is also supplying weaponry to Azerbaijan, in order to maximise President Putin’s role as kingmaker in the conflict.
Back in 2006 Serbia froze arms exports to Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova, taking into account the call for an arms embargo issued by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, OSCE.
Then, it needed to avoid entanglements with Nagorno-Karabakh, while burdened with the Kosovo dispute, and avoid angering Moscow on whose UN Security Council veto it relied vis-a-vis Kosovo.
Moscow is not fond of the idea of Serbia messing with its own backyard by delivering weapons there, particularly as the ammunition to Armenia was shipped through an offshore company in Moldova and then though Georgia.
Now, however, Serbia’s relations with Russia are past their prime, as was made evident in Serbia’s lukewarm reception of Russian medical aid during the COVID-19 pandemic. Belgrade is replacing Moscow with Beijing as its primary Eastern partner.
At the same time, Moscow is unhappy about Vucic trying to resolve the Kosovo issue under US President Donald Trump’s guidance, which would eliminate one of the few sources of Russian influence in the Balkans. The pro-government media in Serbia are now willing to smear Russia in connection with an alleged plot to overthrow the government in Belgrade.
Putin and Russia, of course, have bigger worries. Like other world leaders, Putin has to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before that arrived, a Russian economy reliant on energy exports had to deal with the global crash in oil prices.
Add to that Russia’s involvement in the Syrian and Libyan conflicts, as well as a brewing crisis on Russia’s western border in Belarus, and a Serbian arms dealer doing business in Armenia might merely look like a footnote.
However, with all the problems happening behind the scenes in Serbo-Russian relations, it would seem advisable for Belgrade to distance itself from the Armenian affair by the time Putin visits Belgrade again.
Turkey and Israel are also among Serbia’s partners who might not look benevolently on the Armenian affair.
Serbia’s partnership with Turkey has strengthened in the last couple of years. Economic and trade ties have grown. Serbia sees the partnership with Turkey as useful in engaging the Muslim communities in the Balkans, and Turkey is important for the Balkan countries because of its importance in controlling migration flows.
However, Turkey is also the main ally of Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia and has been increasing its involvement in the Caucasus to counter Russia’s engagement in Syria and Libya.
Turkey’s involvement with wars in Syria and Libya, the Kurdish issue, strategic rivalries in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the domestic crisis of Turkish regime stopped Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from raising the ammunition scandal with Belgrade.
Israel has also been quiet, but Serbia, while openly expressing its desire to improve ties with Israel, should not forget that Israel is supplying drones to Azerbaijan. Israel’s price in Serbia is also higher as it is an important gateway for Belgrade to access the White House.
Last but not least, the US has an uncomfortable history with Tesic. The former US diplomat and ranking official of the Arms Control Association Thomas Countryman told the Serbian media in 2019 that the US had been monitoring Tesic and his transactions for the past 20 years. In 2009, US diplomatic cables pointed to his arms sales in Yemen. The UN imposed a travel ban on Tesic for violating arms exports to Liberia that lasted ten years. In late 2019 the US Treasury Department placed nine individuals and three entities associated with Tesic under sanctions.
Serbia itself risks the prospect of US sanctions if news like the one on ammunition supplies to Armenia become more frequent. Belgrade fears the devastating effect of US sanctions; in 2019 it gave up on further arms purchases from Russia to avoid such sanctions. At the moment, the Trump administration is engaged in mediating the Kosovo dispute. Given that Trump is Serbia’s best chance of getting a less painful settlement on Kosovo, Serbia risks testing US patience by allowing arms exports to conflict zones.
In July, the big powers did not give Serbia a hard time over its arms deliveries to Armenia. Belgrade might not be so lucky this time. The frozen conflict in the Caucasus is no longer frozen. Since September the two nations of the South Caucasus have been engaged in the most dangerous level of combat since the fighting in 2016, with casualties rising daily.
Amid these renewed hostilities, the Azerbaijani defence portal Azeri Defence run the story of Armenian forces using Serbian-made 122mm G-2000 missiles to fire on the Azerbaijani city of Fuzuli. The portal claimed this as proof of Serbia’s insincerity, as the discovered rockets show that Armenia had imported not just Serbia ammunition and mortars but ordnance of a higher calibre.
Serbian dismisses such allegations. As President Vucic told the media: “I have heard the nonsense of various people about how they kill with Serbian weapons. There are no Serbian weapons there … Tanks, planes, drones… None of that is ours. … We wish them peace, they are our two brotherly peoples,” he said.
“We hope that they will be able to get out of the conflict,” he added. Both Serbian-based and international inquiries on the latest allegations have yet to be done.
However, unlike the July fighting, the world is now paying much closer attention to the conflict. The US, Russia and France who are co-chairing the Minsk Group, a conflict resolution mechanism within the OSCE, are demanding a ceasefire. Russia’s Putin is also engaged with his Turkish counterpart, Erdogan, in finding a solution.
This is the same Erdogan that Vucic met in Istanbul in September when Turkey was upset by Serbia’s decision to move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Last time round, Serbia went unpunished. This time, Serbia should be careful not to stick its neck out, now the eyes of the world are looking at the Caucasus.
Vuk Vuksanovic is a Ph.D. researcher in international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and an associate of LSE IDEAS, LSE’s foreign policy think tank. He writes widely on modern foreign and security policy issues and is on Twitter @v_vuksanovic.
The opinions expressed in the Comment section are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN