Russia’s murky ‘humanitarian’ foray into Serbia
It has a satellite-linked operations room, a warehouse full of lifesaving equipment, and climbing walls for training purposes. But the Russian-serbian Humanitarian Centre in Niš, a pleasant city in south Serbia that claims to be the birthplace of Constantine the Great, feels more like David Brent’s office than the Bat Cave.
“I almost don’t want to answer those questions any more,” half groans and half laughs Victor Gulevich, a stocky Russian emergency ministry official and co-director of the centre, when asked where he keeps his cloak and dagger. “Look around. Honestly, tell me if you find any spy kit.”
Mr Gulevich – and the Russian and Serbian governments – say this modest industrial unit is Moscow’s contribution to tackling the floods and forest fires that periodically overwhelm the lower Danube basin.
But Western officials suspect that is a cover story for a Russian espionage network whose purpose is not to fight fires, but to start them. With the global confrontation between Russia and the West showing no sign of abating, the countries of the Western Balkans are the last corner of former Communist Europe not yet in the EU or Nato. And while some of the confrontation consists of rival diplomatic offensives, Western officials believe Russia is willing to go much further to prevent regional governments moving closer towards the North Atlantic Alliance.
In 2016, Montenegro accused Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency of plotting to topple the government before its accession to Nato. Earlier this year Greece issued an extraordinary public rebuke to the Russian foreign ministry and expelled two diplomats it accused of trying to whip up nationalist opposition to an agreement to solve its long running name dispute with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
The Prespa Agreement, signed by both countries’ prime ministers in June, would lift a major obstacle on Macedonia’s path to both Nato and EU membership. Macedonians will vote in a referendum on the deal on Sept 30, and both country’s parliaments will have to ratify it.
Western diplomats say they are braced for possible Russian attempts to disrupt those votes. Russia has denied both allegations.
There is no suggestion the Humanitarian Centre in Niš is involved in either incident, and when The Daily Telegraph visited earlier this summer it was difficult to see it as anything more nefarious than a soft power project.
There is no barbed wire fence, no armed guard, and the handful of permanent staff seem somewhat bewildered – if a little exasperated – to be asked about the spying allegations.
But rumours continue to swirl about its true purpose. Last year Hoyt Bryant Lee, a US deputy assistant secretary of state, told a US Senate committee that Washington was suspicious of “what it might become” if Serbia granted a Russian request to give the place protected diplomatic status. In January this year, a Bosnian news site claimed that the centre had been hosting paramilitary training for a nationalist group called Serbian Honour, which in turn was providing a militia loyal to Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, the Serbian-dominated entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The implication was nothing short of explosive: that Russia was helping
‘We get money from the Serbian diaspora to help veterans and families of the war in Bosnia’
Mr Dodik build an unofficial army to crush domestic opponents and to pursue by force the same vision of a separate Serbian republic that sparked the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.
It would be difficult to imagine a more brazen act of geo-political arson, and Mr Dodik, Russia, the centre’s management and Serbian Honour all deny plotting anything of the sort.
“There are no paramilitary formations and no one is training them,” he said. “It is completely false. If it were true, do you think that months later there would not have been an intervention by the West?” Bojan Stojkovic, the heavily tattooed head of Serbian Honour, claims to have been shocked at the suggestion.
“We’re a purely humanitarian organisation,” he insisted in an interview at a café in Niš’s picturesque former Ottoman fort. “We get money from the Serbian diaspora to help veterans and families of veterans of the war in Bosnia.”
Mr Stojkovic, a soft-spoken but muscle-bound body builder, said he met Mr Dodik briefly at an event in January, but strenuously denied any paramilitary plotting. And though he acknowledged he had once visited the Humanitarian Centre, it was not to receive any kind of training.
“It was a dinner with Bosnian war veterans organised by Serbian Honour and the Russia delegation,” he said. “I organised anti-nato protests in Niš to commemorate the 1999 bombing, and they gave me a medal for it.”
The “Russian delegation” was not an official one. A badge Mr Stojkovic showed was signed by one Valery Kalyakin, a Walter Mitty-ish figure who heads an obscure Russian NGO and writes blogs in praise of GRU special forces units.
There is little evidence Mr Kalyakin ever served in the Russian military, but he does appear to be attracted to trouble spots. In 2015 he visited both South Ossetia, the Russian-backed breakaway region of Georgia at the centre of a five-day war in 2008, and the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in Ukraine.
Back at the Humanitarian Centre, Mr Gulevich says his preoccupations are floods, fires and training emergency workers.
He makes no apology for taking part in a soft power project. “Everyone has been so welcoming. We have great connection, Russians and Serbs,” he said. “We couldn’t do anything to help in 1999. Now, maybe we can.”