Russia is making a concerted “push” against the West in Balkans, but is not nearly as influential as many people think, Bulgarian expert Dimitar Bechev said on Thursday at a packed talk on his book Rival Power: Russia in Southeast Europe at the London School of Economics.
Bechev, a research fellow at the University of North Carolina, said the Western media was obsessed with the notion of Russia as a “partner-turned-enemy” in the Balkans, and the Middle East.
In reality, he said, if Russia was increasingly present in the Balkan region, it was not always because it was imposing itself but because local powers and elites were engaging Russia to serve their own domestic agendas.
Russia was “influential in the region because of factors that enable it to interfere,” he went on, noting that it does not rely on investing serious resources.
It has no peacekeepers in the region and is no longer promising billions of euros in energy projects, he said, but rather “shapes the narrative to a receptive audience. This allows Moscow to be very present in the public mind”.
Bechev said did not take much to find people in many Balkan countries who blamed the West for their woes, and Russia was widely seen as a useful counterweight. For religious and cultural reasons, Russia was also able to make good use of its “soft power” in a region where the “narrative structure tends to favour Russia”.
The author said Russia had long been present in the Balkan region, apart from during a brief period following the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in Serbia. What had changed over the last decade was not so much its presence as the amount of controversy it aroused, as East-West relations deteriorated.
Bechev describe the 2014 annexation of Crimea as a turning point, after which Western countries had increasingly given up on the idea of retaining some sort of partnership with Vladimir Putin’s government.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
