Bosnia’s Dysfunction Snarls Efforts to Curb Moscow’s Reach within the Balkans

Already struggling to include intractable crises within the Middle East and Ukraine, the United States can also be grappling with an deadlock within the Balkans over a gasoline pipeline into Bosnia, a difficulty that’s freighted with large geopolitical stakes.

The challenge, backed by each the United States and the European Union however blocked by the ethnic feuds which have lengthy hobbled Bosnia, goals to interrupt Moscow’s stranglehold on gasoline provides to a fragile nation tugged between East and West.

The proposed pipeline, which might herald pure gasoline from neighboring Croatia, a member of NATO and of the European Union, could be solely 100 miles lengthy and value roughly $110 million, a pittance subsequent to the $15 billion it took to construct the Nord Stream gasoline connector between Russia and Germany.

But it could severely scale back Moscow’s affect in a extremely unstable area. Russia regularly used its management of power as a weapon towards Ukraine within the years main as much as its full-scale invasion in February 2022 and has since used it to undermine European unity by providing candy power offers to nations corresponding to Hungary and Serbia.

Russia has no territorial claims on Bosnia or different Balkan nations, and its fundamental objective has been to maintain them from integrating with the West.

The stalled pipeline “is much more important than just Bosnia and Herzegovina or future infrastructure in a small Balkan country,” stated Vesna Pusic, a former international minister of Croatia who helped steer her nation into the European Union in 2013.

“This is about closing the avenues for Russia’s destabilizing influence in Europe,” Ms. Pusic stated in an interview. “The big avenue is of course Ukraine, and this is a little one. But if it is not closed it will grow” and radiate instability throughout and past the Balkans, she added.

Unlike different European nations that diversified power provides after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bosnia has remained completely depending on Moscow for its pure gasoline.

Without different provides from the West, James C. O’Brien, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, stated in a phone interview, “Bosnia risks falling behind and becoming uniquely vulnerable” to stress from Moscow.

Mr. O’Brien visited the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, this month as a part of U.S. efforts to get the pipeline from Croatia shifting, jolt politicians out of their home feuds and blunt Russian affect. “This is a vulnerability that has to be closed,” Mr. O’Brien stated.

Bosnia’s fundamental sources of power are hydropower and native coal. But whereas pure gasoline from Russia makes up lower than 5 p.c of the nation’s whole power combine, it helps energy a giant aluminum manufacturing facility and fuels the heating crops that hold Sarajevo heat in winter.

A fragile amalgam of territories inhabited by Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats, few of whom are religiously observant, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina has stumbled from disaster to disaster since 1995, when the Dayton Peace Accords ended years of bloodletting within the former Yugoslavia.

The peace deal stopped wars that killed some 100,000 individuals within the early Nineteen Nineties, nevertheless it saddled Bosnia with an elaborate and extremely dysfunctional political system. The nation is split into two largely self-governing “entities” — a Muslim-Croat federation and a predominantly Serb space referred to as Republika Srpska.

Presiding over this rickety, disjointed construction is a weak central authorities with three presidents, one for every ethnic group, that are alleged to share energy however whose political leaders thrive on stoking division.

The Republika Srpska, led by a pugnacious Serb nationalist, Milorad Dodik, has repeatedly threatened to secede, a transfer that might danger setting off a brand new spherical of bloodshed. Mr. Dodik, an everyday customer to Russia, most just lately on Wednesday, for conferences with President Vladimir V. Putin, is pushing a separate pipeline challenge that might enhance gasoline provides from Russia. His fief has its personal gasoline firm, Gas-Res, managed by ethnic Serbs, and a Russian-owned oil refinery depending on Russian crude.

Bosnia’s ethnic Croat chief, Dragan Covic, says that he helps the proposed Western pipeline however that he needs it positioned below the management of an organization to be run by ethnic Croats as a substitute of by Bosnia’s current pipeline operator, BH Gas, which relies in Sarajevo and run by Bosniaks. The firm Mr. Covic needs to create could be based mostly within the Bosnian metropolis of Mostar, ethnically combined however lengthy a bastion of Croat chauvinism.

The squabbling prompted an unusually blunt intervention final month by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken. In letters to the international ministers of Bosnia and Croatia, Mr. Blinken denounced Mr. Covic for obstructing “a critical project.” His calls for for a brand new, ethnically Croat firm, he stated, “are duplicative, economically unviable and put the entire project at risk.”

“Such obvious corruption and self-dealing could jeopardize” Bosnia’s hopes of in the future becoming a member of the European Union, Mr. Blinken added.

Mr. O’Brien, the assistant secretary of state, citing diplomatic confidentiality, declined to say whether or not the Croatian and Bosnian international ministers had responded to Mr. Blinken’s broadside. Both ministers declined to be interviewed.

Mr. Covic, who additionally declined to be interviewed, has stated that he solely needs to guard authentic Croat pursuits, not block Bosnia’s path into the European Union.

Nihada Glamoc, director of BH Gas, acknowledged that almost all of her firm’s executives and staff had been Bosniaks however stated that there was no want for a brand new Croat-led pipeline operator.

“It is all just political,” she stated, noting that her solely curiosity was to make sure a “diverse and stable supply” of power.

Muris Cicic, an economist and president of the Bosnian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Sarajevo, described the bickering over the U.S.-backed pipeline and Mr. Dodik’s efforts to construct another to usher in extra Russian gasoline as “a model of Bosnia’s dysfunction.”

“Everything in this country is based on ethnic differentiation, even gas,” he stated, including: “Our politicians have divided everything that can possibly be divided and placed each piece under their command. It is beyond all economic logic.”

The feuding has not solely obstructed widespread motion within the pursuits of the entire nation, Mr. Cicic stated, but additionally created fertile floor for Russia to push its pursuits.

“Bosnia is the dividing point between East and West — the point where Russia can easily provoke instability through people like Dodik,” Mr. Cicic stated.

Mr. Dodik, he added, is likely to be probably the most open in expressing a want to redraw Bosnia’s borders and hold it out of the European Union, however he isn’t alone in selling slim ethnic and infrequently corrupt pursuits on the danger of stoking pressure and even violent battle.

“We unfortunately have lots of Dodiks here,” he stated.

The European Union accepted Bosnia as a “candidate country” in 2022, a part of its efforts to blunt Russian affect within the Balkans after the invasion of Ukraine. But formal negotiations haven’t began and the European bloc’s govt arm in November delivered a bleak evaluation of Bosnia’s prospects, saying the nation had made “no progress” in combating corruption and dawdled on “socio-economic reforms” demanded by Brussels.

The concept of constructing a pipeline to usher in gasoline from neighboring Croatia has been round for almost 15 years, ever since Russia reduce off gasoline deliveries by Ukraine to the Balkans in 2009 and left Sarajevo shivering for days in subzero temperatures.

“We were very scared by the 2009 shutdown and realized that we had zero energy security,” recalled Almir Becarevic, who ran BH Gas on the time.

Gazprom, Russia’s power behemoth, he stated, had for years appeared “just a normal company selling gas,” however “it steadily became clear that Gazprom was playing political games.” Gas, he added, “grew into a big geopolitical thing.”

Mr. Becarevic and others started lobbying for a pipeline from Croatia to finish Russia’s monopoly however made little headway, even after the opening in 2021 of a facility on an island off the Croatian coast to deal with deliveries of liquefied pure gasoline.

“For years there was nothing but blah, blah, blah,” Mr. Becarevic stated. “But the war in Ukraine changed everything. The situation has now changed 100 percent.”