Serbia, both independently and as part of the newly formed Yugoslavia, proved that it was equally able to ally itself with Western powers as its interests dictated, as demonstrated by its alliances with the United States in the First World War and France during and after the war.
Between the two world wars, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, ruled by the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty and with an ethnic Serbian majority, was part of the Eastern European buffer against both Germany and the Soviet Union. The honeymoon that began with the Soviet liberation of Yugoslavia from Nazi occupation and the inception of a communist government in Yugoslavia was short-lived. George Kennan , the legendary father of containment, perceived a communist but independent Yugoslavia as a way to drive a wedge within the Soviet bloc.
This is inaccurate. Boris Yeltsin despised Milosevic for his support of the failed communist coup against Gorbachev, after which Yeltsin came to power. The NATO intervention in Kosovo in represented a turning point for Russian foreign policy, and not because of sympathies toward Serbia.
Meanwhile, in the post-Milosevic era governments in Belgrade have been suspicious of Putin due to his studiously neutral stance during the anti-Milosevic revolution. It would be wrong to argue that there has been a long-standing Belgrade-Moscow compact. It is through this prism that the current relationship should be assessed. By backing Serbia on issues like Kosovo, the Kremlin believes that it gains support and influence in the Balkans cheaply.
By backing Serbia, Russia is testing its own desire for a multipolar order , one based on a concert of great powers. At the core of this is an effort by Moscow to overturn the unipolar world order it perceived in the Balkans in the s, and to reaffirm its status as a global great power—a status it feels has been wrongfully denied by the West.
But by seeking to do this on the cheap, Russia has limited the extent of its ability to influence. Moscow has no military presence in the Balkans; Putin pulled Russian peacekeepers out of Bosnia and Kosovo in Given this, it would be reasonable to ask why Serbia feels the needs to juggle between Russia and the West. The answer is that Serbia has pursued this balancing act in the power vacuum that has existed since , when the European Union and the U.
The shock of the Euro crisis created an impulse in Serbian foreign policy for hedging and diversification of partnerships, as Serbia increasingly felt itself on the periphery of the Western world.
This power vacuum has been exacerbated by the migration crisis and Brexit. Both have raised very real questions of whether Serbia will actually join the European Union. Seeing only deadlock in its efforts to join the European Union, Serbia is ready to pit Western and non-Western actors against each other to see from whom it can extract better political and economic conditions. It is not the product of emotional ties from the past.
Another reason why the Serbian government has kept the Russian option open is so as not to alienate pro-Russian segments of the Serbian electorate. Serbia and the Balkans have seen a rise in illiberal political movements in recent years, with EU policymakers frequently turning a blind eye to these developments.
As a result, the Serbian government keeps a Russian option alive as leverage over the West, and to avoid criticism for a downward trend in democracy and the rule of law, as the political scene remains dominated by a single man Vucic and freedom of the press continues to decline.
These domestic calculations have been further exacerbated by the underlying power that Kosovo holds in Serbian politics. The Serbian political class is aware that it cannot move forward without progress toward resolving the long-standing Kosovo issue.
But in order to save face with its constituents, the Serbian leadership has to come up with some settlement in which Serbia will not be perceived as the total loser of the Kosovo dispute. To that end, Serbia must have a great power backer in the negotiating process, and as Serbia lacks a patron in the West, Russia is useful in that role.
As long as Kosovo remains in play and as long as Serbian leadership lacks a settlement acceptable to public opinion, Russia will have a high place in Serbian foreign policy considerations. Written Bulgarian is pretty close to the Russian alphabet and Russians can easily read it. The vocabulary is quite similar whereas Russian grammar is different from Bulgarian.
Both languages are Slavic, and both have the same origin. Both have the same script. Well, Serbian has the Latin alphabet too, besides sharing the same script with Russian. Russian and Serbian are both in the category IV of language difficulties — it will take the learner to master either of the two some hours or 44 weeks.
Both are hard in their own ways. It depends. If you are a native English speaker, German is much easier. If you are a native Slavic speaker e. Serbian is thus one of the easiest language to learn to write. The order of the letters differs in the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets. Serbian, written in the Cyrillic alphabet is the official language.
Serbian has 2 alphabets. Answer below! The difference is similar to the difference between English a West Germanic language and Swedish a North Germanic language.
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