Putin expresses support for Vučić: “I hope he will be Serbia’s next prime minister”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed open support for the leader of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), Aleksandar Vučić, ahead of the early parliamentary elections to be held in Serbia on October 25, 2026. The statements were made at the plenary session of the Valdai Discussion Club, as BBC Serbian reports.

“Serbia’s current leadership, the former president and, I hope, future prime minister Aleksandar Vučić, pursues a balanced policy and shows a desire for cooperation with Russia. We certainly welcome this and will reciprocate,” Putin said, according to BBC reporting. He also said Russia greatly appreciates Serbia’s balanced stance and its decision not to impose sanctions on Moscow — Belgrade, together with Minsk, is the only European capital that has not imposed any form of sanctions on Russia since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The European Union has for years asked Serbia to align with its foreign policy, that is, to join the sanctions against Russia, but Belgrade has consistently refused. Vučić has repeated for years that as long as he is in power, sanctions against Russia will not be imposed. The Student List, one of the actors in the upcoming elections, has also said it will not impose sanctions if it comes to power; most electoral lists are against sanctions, while some of them are also against Serbia’s EU membership, as BBC writes.

Putin also spoke about what he called the West’s “unfair treatment” of Serbia: “They (the West) once formulated the Dayton Agreement themselves and now nobody wants to implement it. And in other cases they impose certain decisions on the Serbs.” “The Serbs found themselves as a divided people in Europe, divided by force. That is bad, because every injustice leads to some kind of complication of the conflict,” the Russian president said. A few days before the general elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milorad Dodik visited Putin in Moscow, while before the Serbian elections Vučić and Putin spoke by phone — a conversation after which Serbia secured a new three-month agreement for the supply of Russian gas, according to BBC reporting.