In 2025, Serbia bid farewell to its foreign policy doctrine based on four pillars – the EU, the United States, Russia and China.
By Nikolay Krastev
The year 2025 was one of the most complex years Serbia has gone through, not only domestically but also in terms of foreign policy. Alongside the mass protests by students and large segments of Serbian society demanding the resignation of President Aleksandar Vučić—whom they see as a source of corruption, nepotism and authoritarianism—Serbia also parted ways with its foreign policy, writes Balkan affairs journalist and expert Nikolay Krastev.
At the end of 2024, the outgoing U.S. administration of President Joe Biden imposed sanctions on Serbia’s national oil company NIS (Naftna Industrija Srbije) because, as a Russian energy asset in the Balkans owned by Gazprom, it was allegedly using revenues to finance the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine.
Vučić said at the time that he did not understand why an outgoing U.S. administration would take such a step, calmly announcing that once Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States, the issue would be resolved and the sanctions lifted. However, over the past 12 months, not only were the sanctions not lifted, they were even tightened.
After Washington postponed the imposition of sanctions several times, they were ultimately enforced. The U.S. Treasury implemented them, and from early November the NIS refinery in the city of Pančevo stopped operating. This happened after Vučić and his foreign policy team wasted 11 months without resolving this key issue for the economic and financial stability of the Balkan country—an issue that will continue to have repercussions in the new year, 2026.
The Serbian president relied too heavily on the expectation that once he met U.S. President Donald Trump, the matter would be resolved. He visited the United States in early May, expecting Trump to receive him, but such a meeting never took place. Trump did not invite him to the White House, let alone to his Mar-a-Lago estate. Because of this awkward situation, Vučić said he had suffered a serious health problem and had to return quickly to Belgrade, flying nearly 11,000 kilometers without difficulty. Two days later, he traveled to Moscow for Vladimir Putin’s parade marking the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe.
But neither in Moscow then, nor later in Beijing at the end of the summer, was Vučić able to obtain from Putin a solution to the issue of NIS’s fate.
In 2025, Serbia abandoned its foreign policy doctrine based on four pillars—the EU, the United States, Russia and China. For nearly 20 years, this document had defined Belgrade’s relations with the main international players. Upon coming to power, however, Aleksandar Vučić fetishized it and declared that Belgrade would work independently and equally well with all international actors, guided solely by Serbia’s national interests. Viewing international relations as an “all-inclusive table” from which Belgrade could freely take whatever it liked from all major global actors changed dramatically after the Kremlin’s aggression against Ukraine in early 2022. Aleksandar Vučić learned this the hard way in 2025.
The first lesson was that Serbia is not the former Yugoslavia, which pursued a skillful foreign policy through the Non-Aligned Movement from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The second lesson is that Vučić has likely abandoned the illusion that he is a political heir to Tito and can, like him, afford to stand as an equal to the United States and the USSR (Russia), without acknowledging that the world has irreversibly changed and that one cannot step into the same river twice. Instead, he became an object of ridicule over the NIS issue, as depicted by renowned Belgrade cartoonist Predrag Koraksić – Corax – who portrayed him as a ball being passed back and forth between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.
The past year was also a serious test for Serbian–Russian relations, which the authorities in Belgrade had presented as exceptionally close. But are they really?
Throughout 2025, Russia refused to resolve the NIS problem and, in its familiar diplomatic tone, said that the West and the EU were trying to destroy their friendly relations. Guided by its political and economic interests in the Balkans, Moscow clearly showed, as Belgrade crisis management expert Darko Obradović commented to Bulgarian National Television (BNT), that it does not want to part with NIS.
According to him, the Kremlin uses NIS as a political tool through which to influence social processes in Serbia, maintaining the myth of sincere friendship between Serbs and Russians.
For Moscow, according to many Serbian independent analysts, NIS has extremely minor importance in energy terms, and its significance is rather political with regard to Serbia.
During his annual press conference, Russian President Putin sent a clear message to Belgrade that the NIS issue cannot simply be resolved, valuing the Serbian refinery at nearly €3.5 billion—despite the fact that in 2008 Gazprom Neft acquired it for $400 million as part of the large package linked to the unrealized Russian gas pipeline “South Stream.”
Russia did not wish to do anything regarding NIS, even for the simple reason that Serbia, along with Belarus, remained the only European countries that did not impose sanctions over the aggression in Ukraine.
According to Srećko Đukić, a former ambassador of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to Sofia in the late 1990s, this proves that Moscow uses Belgrade as it sees fit. As evidence, he pointed to the NIS issue and, regarding gas supplies to Serbia, said that Russia applies short-term solutions, providing gas for one or at most three months at a time. Independent energy experts in Belgrade cited the Bulgarian experience with the introduction of a special administrator at the Russian-owned refinery in Burgas as a possible option for Serbia.
Vučić, however, commented that Serbia would not seize foreign property, although he even offered Moscow a temporary buyout of its stake.
Thus, over NIS, Serbia found itself caught between the hammer and the anvil in its relations with the United States and Russia. Serbia’s refusal to halt the sale of the building of the former Yugoslav Army General Staff to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for the construction of a Trump Tower added even more uncertainty to relations with Washington. Đukić recalled on regional television N1 that in the 20th century Serbia spent 25 years under sanctions and that during that period the country learned nothing.
Another lever through which Moscow holds Belgrade is blocking Kosovo from gaining international recognition and UN membership.
This year, Serbia launched its second diplomatic battle, similar to that of 2013–2014, persuading a number of countries—mainly in Africa and Asia—to withdraw their recognition of Kosovo. But this effort also appears to have ended with limited success, after Sudan and Syria decided to recognize the youngest Balkan state, which declared independence in 2008.
Serbia also worsened relations with Turkey after Ankara delivered a shipment of drones to Kosovo. Turkey is known to be one of Pristina’s strong advocates. With this move, Vučić lost an ally in the Balkans in the person of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Relations with Brussels have stagnated for several years, with no progress, as Belgrade has not opened a single negotiation cluster in the past five years. At the end of 2025, Aleksandar Vučić refused to attend the annual EU–Western Balkans meeting, which came as a cold shower for Brussels. The EU had been continuously courting Belgrade in an effort to persuade it to recognize Kosovo, curb Russian influence in the Western Balkans and help Serbia complete its European integration process.
Vučić floated the idea that all Western Balkan states should be admitted together in 2030. This appeared as an attempt by Belgrade not to be overtaken by the small Adriatic state of Montenegro, from which Serbia separated in 2006 after an independence referendum.
This foreign policy idea found partial understanding in Paris, which announced it would not allow the opening of five negotiating chapters with Podgorica. Subsequently, however, after talks by Montenegrin Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, France and the European Commission agreed to open all five chapters. Vučić attempted to use the old French–Serbian friendship, but it proved weaker than the EU’s enlargement policy in the Western Balkans. After Paris received clear guarantees from Podgorica, Montenegro continued as a firm favorite to become an EU member in 2028. Albania is also among the favorites.
The EU’s tougher tone toward Belgrade showed that Brussels will not accommodate Aleksandar Vučić regarding the protests in Serbia and relations with Kosovo following the Ohrid Agreement reached with Pristina in 2023. Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos, during her visit to Belgrade, clearly told young people at a meeting that their questions about corruption are also questions the EU has for the Balkan country.
The outgoing year showed how lonely and isolated Serbia has become in foreign policy terms after 13 years of Aleksandar Vučić’s rule, and how the lack of genuine partners and goals can push it to the periphery of international relations. Facing sanctions from Washington, blocked EU membership, and energy pressure from Russia over the NIS refinery, gas agreements and accusations of supplying weapons to Ukraine, Serbia will have to rethink its foreign policy moves in light of the new realities, which force Belgrade to look reality in the eye.
Will Vučić continue to maneuver between Moscow, Washington, Brussels and Beijing as he has so far? That remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: this foreign policy can no longer deliver the results Vučić seeks, and it is high time he decided on which of the four chairs he will sit.
Source: Eualive.bg