Serbia’s Foreign Policy in the Context of War in Ukraine (2022–2025): Balancing Against Russia as a Stress Test of the Multi-Vector Strategy

Mitrović Sava (Istraživač-saradnik, Fakultet političkih nauka, Univerzitet u Beogradu), sava.mitrovic@fpn.bg.ac.rs

In an international environment marked by an increasingly pronounced confrontation between the West and the East, Serbia’s foreign policy strategy has been exposed to a range of growing challenges. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Serbia’s multi-vector faced its most severe stress test to date. Far more intensively than after the annexation of Crimea, Serbia was subjected to pressure to join a coalition aimed at the comprehensive balancing of the Russian Federation. Against this backdrop, the article proposes a two-dimensional balancing strategy matrix to analyse Serbia’s diplomatic, economic, and security-related measures of balancing Russia. The central research question addressed in this study is whether Serbia, through the balancing measures it has undertaken, has abandoned its multi-vector foreign policy strategy after 2022. The findings indicate that Serbia has frequently, albeit selectively, employed mechanisms of diplomatic balancing against Russia, while simultaneously seeking to mitigate their effects by maintaining high-level contacts and publicly justifying these decisions as the product of external pressures and coercion. By reducing the scope of military-technical cooperation with Russia and indirectly supplying arms to Ukraine, Serbia has also engaged in low- to medium-intensity security balancing against Russia. However, by refusing to impose sanctions and to terminate its energy arrangements with Moscow, Serbia has refrained from economic balancing. The selectivity of Serbia’s balancing behaviour, its predominantly low to medium intensity, and persistent efforts to mitigate its impact at the bilateral level, suggest that balancing against Russia is better understood as tactical manoeuvring within the framework of a broader multi-vector strategy, rather than as a fundamental strategic reorientation.

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