The director of Vreme, Stevan Ristić, said that President Aleksandar Vučić’s policy of “balancing” on the international stage has collapsed, adding that he would be surprised if Serbia does not decide to take over NIS.
Speaking on N1, Ristić disagreed with Minister Dubravka Đedović Handanović’s claim that the decision regarding NIS is “the most difficult decision in Serbia’s history.”
“I think this is just another meganarrative the government is selling to citizens — and one that has worked for them. Vučić keeps a large part of his electorate in a kind of hypnosis, promoting the idea that the Russian model of governance is normal and desirable, because he applies the same model here. And he uses his voters very skillfully when bargaining with the West, because research shows that 80–90% of his supporters are pro-Russian,” Ristić said.
Regarding NIS, he believes developments are leading toward one inevitable outcome — state takeover.
“I’ll be surprised if that decision is not made,” he added.
Ristić also stated that Vučić’s foreign-policy maneuvering has reached a dead end.
“The war in Ukraine has been ongoing since February 2022, and Serbia has not only done nothing — it proudly repeats that it is the only country that did not impose sanctions. So the question is: what happens with NIS now? What was the plan all this time? Unless Vučić, in his often catastrophic geopolitical predictions, truly believed that Putin would win the war. And his backup plan, I think, was that Trump would return to power — which he did — but Trump has shown far less understanding for Vučić and for Serbia than Vučić expected. And frankly, I don’t think Trump cares much about this region,” Ristić argued.
He then referred to the controversial proposal involving the Generalštab (General Staff) and the idea of giving land to the U.S. in order to influence political outcomes.
“I refuse to believe that in 2025 someone truly thinks geopolitical problems can be solved by gifting a plot of land. The more they repeat this story, the more suspicious it seems. What I see is someone extracting money, laundering money, serious corruption. Because I cannot understand how they claim — falsely — that leasing land for 99 years would solve relations with Trump, and by extension solve the NIS issue and the oil derivatives problem,” Ristić told N1.
