In March 2023, in her first interview for the local media — given to Serbia’s public broadcaster — Jelena Milincic, editor-in-chief of RT Balkan at the time, said, “We are not here to operate a website, but to start a television channel. We have been invited to come to Serbia for a very long time […] It is in Serbia’s interest to have a Russian TV station here as well. We currently have a site that is, of course, less successful than Sputnik [a Russian state news agency], but television is the goal […] RT is seen as the modern child of Russia.” Milincic added that RT Balkan is registered as a Serbian media, even though it is funded from abroad.
Two years after its launch, RT Balkan still has no television channel. Nevertheless, it has grown into Russia’s main vehicle for spreading propaganda in the Balkans, according to the unanimous opinion of experts researching Russian influence in Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro, who were quoted in a recent documentary of the regional media network BIRN.
Deep-rooted relations
There are several explanations for why RT chose Serbia for its Balkan office, and why RT’s representatives are so open about their intentions. Firstly, Russia and Serbia have long-standing relations rooted in a shared culture of Slavic heritage and Orthodox Christianity. This has made Russia popular with part of Serbia’s population and created close relations between Russian politicians and their Serbian counterparts.
The rise of RT Balkan was also facilitated by the fact that the government controls the bulk of the media market, which it uses to spread its own propaganda. The anti-NATO and anti-EU narratives exacerbated by NATO’s 1999 intervention in Kosovo – whose independence is still not recognized by Serbia – fostered a widespread pro-Russian sentiment in Serbia, making it a receptive market for the Kremlin’s narratives.
Finally, Serbia is strategically located for RT’s mission to counterbalance the perceived NATO and EU influence in the Balkans. With the exception of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, Serbia is surrounded by EU and/or NATO member states: Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Romania. Several of these neighboring countries have linguistic, cultural, and even media ties with Serbia.
Even before RT Balkan opened in 2022, most of Serbia’s media outlets emphasized the closeness of Serbians and Russians, and portrayed Russia as a leading military, energy and nuclear power capable of protecting Serbia’s interests. At the same time, the EU and NATO were presented as international institutions in decline.
RT Balkan has not brought Russian propaganda to Serbia: it has tailored the Kremlin’s narrative to highly receptive local audiences, allowing it to spread more easily throughout the region.
Who is behind RT Balkan?
As long as RT Balkan lacks a television channel, its website remains the main platform for video content, including clips featuring commentary from the current editor-in-chief, Nikola Vrzic.
Yet, until now, RT Balkan had no company information on its website. In violation of Serbian media laws, it does not list the name of the editor-in-chief or a physical address. There are no bylines naming their journalists and the only contact information is a landline and a generic email address. “An independent nonprofit organization – TV Novosti” is listed where the founder’s name should be. Besides the generic email, the only other address listed is for website visitors interested in working for RT Balkan. In Serbia, it is highly unusual for a news outlet or nonprofit organisation to include the email for job candidates as part of the website’s contact information section.
An entity named “RT Balkan Television” was registered in the publicly accessible Serbian Commercial Register on 5 November 2023 as a limited liability company. The listed address is not where the newsroom is physically located.
Although the names of journalists and editors are not readily available, the identities of RT Balkan columnists are prominently displayed. Some are well-known journalists; others are professors, artists, or recognizable public figures. Most of them are known for their right-wing and nationalistic political views. RT hired the Bosnian-Herzegovinian writer Muharem Bazdulj, who vocally supports Serbian nationalist politicians, as well as the Serbian right-wing political scientist Slobodan Antonic, a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade.
Among the twenty-odd names listed for these columnists, there is only one woman: Sanja Domazet, a columnist, writer and literary critic. Yet the person who makes RT Balkan seem like a credible media outlet is also a woman. Ljiljana Smajlovic, a leading journalist for RT Balkan who hosts long video interviews, is the former president of the Association of Serbian Journalists. She is also a former member of the Executive Board of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF) which publicly announced her resignation in 2022, asserting that “the collaboration with a propaganda platform financed by the Russian government is not compatible with the goals and the mission of ECPMF.”
Although none of the people involved with RT Balkan have publicly admitted it, a North-Macedonian fact-checking outlet reported that RT and Sputnik are two of the wealthiest editorial teams in Serbia with the best-paid journalists.
Influencers and campaigns
RT Balkan’s editors and columnists operate as influencers rather than journalists. They ensure the outlet’s visibility and impact within Serbia’s media environment. Nikola Vrzic, the current editor-in-chief of RT Balkan; Filip Rodic, the editor of RT Balkan’s website; and Muharem Bazdulj, RT Balkan’s columnist, are frequent guests on popular talk shows on Serbian national television. Presented as journalists or analysts affiliated with RT Balkan, they are given a wide-reaching platform to legitimize and spread Kremlin propaganda.
What’s more, some of these RT Balkan influencers are actively working to discredit prominent independent journalists in Serbia, a strategy that may benefit certain factions of the Serbian government more than their employers in Russia. Vrzic began targeting KRIK, an online news outlet investigating connections between politics, crime and corruption, after it published an investigative article about connections between a notorious drug lord in Serbia and two members of the Serbian secret police. Vrzic “debunked” KRIK’s report while appearing as a guest on a morning TV program, accusing KRIK of harboring ties with an organisation close to the CIA. A number of media outlets in Serbia quickly quoted Vrzic, repeating his slanderous claim in headlines.
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Publish date : 2024-09-30 02:47:00
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