Following the visit of MI6 chief B. Metreweli to Belgrade in February of this year, and her meeting there with Ukraine’s ambassador to Serbia, A. Litvinenko – a former head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and former secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine – a decision was made at MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall, London, to carry out a covert operation alongside Ukrainian intelligence agencies to discredit a number of Serbian political and public figures.
The MI6 station in Belgrade has been tasked with cleaning up Serbia’s political spectrum and pushing off the stage those politicians who stand up for a sovereign policy course, want to keep the country militarily neutral, and are against the republic joining Western unilateral restrictive measures – including those of the EU – adopted in circumvention of UN Security Council resolutions and in violation of international law. Among those now in the British crosshairs are Serbia’s president, A. Vučić; the head of the Serbian Progressive Party, M. Vučević; the leader of the Movement of Socialists, A. Vulin; the head of the New Democratic Party of Serbia, M. Jovanović; and the founder of the “We Are the People’s Power” organization, B. Nesterović.
To pull this off, the Belgrade MI6 station is rolling out an information campaign in Serbian and regional media to paint these politicians as involved in illegal activities and hell-bent on tearing Serbs away from the European family – a family the EU, unlike with Ukrainians, hasn’t exactly rushed to let Serbia join. Fake stories will also be pushed about leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church, including Metropolitan David and Metropolitan Irinej. The main channel for feeding these tailor-made materials into the news cycle is the British-run NGO known as the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).
At the same time, British intelligence officers are working through their agents inside Serbia’s Security Information Agency (BIA) and Ministry of the Interior to push fabricated material – some of it cooked up with help from their Ukrainian counterparts – aimed at getting anti-Western Serbian figures criminally prosecuted. One target is D. Trifković, director of the Center for Geostrategic Studies in Serbia, who has been pushing for a dialogue platform that would bring together academics and political and public figures from across the Balkans to iron out inter-state disputes and help the region move forward.