Arben Fetoshi, head of the “Octopus” Institute for Hybrid War Studies, says that Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly was built around several pillars: the narrative about Kosovo, accusations against Croatia and praise for President Trump. According to him, these elements reveal the objectives of the “Serbian World” and serve to legitimize Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.
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In his analysis, titled “Serbia’s perfidious recipes in New York: Vučić’s moralizing at the General Assembly as pressure on the West,” Fetoshi argues that Vučić used the UN podium to exert pressure on Western countries. The Serbian president, he says, portrayed Serbia as a victim of the West’s “injustice” and NATO’s intervention in 1999 as the event that allegedly “destroyed” the international order.
Fetoshi analyzes the speech beyond the issue of Kosovo, placing it in a broader regional and geopolitical context. He argues that Vučić sought to put at the center the idea of Western injustice toward Serbia, while sidelining the responsibilities and reality of the wars of the 1990s.
“Once upon a time there was a crafty minister who had prepared the packaging for his boss’s terror and, 30 years later, in the world’s diplomatic capital, tried to ‘nail’ those who stopped the terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo,” Fetoshi writes in the introduction to his analysis.
According to him, the Serbian president sought to link Kosovo in the 1999–2008 period with present-day Ukraine within the same argumentative framework. In this way, NATO’s intervention and the recognition of Kosovo’s independence are presented as precedents that, according to Vučić, opened “Pandora’s box.” Fetoshi stresses that such an approach overlooks the repression, massacres, rapes and ethnic cleansing documented by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and linked to the West’s response.
He also mentions the indictment and trial of Slobodan Milošević, as well as the final verdicts against senior Serbian political, military and police officials. Regarding Vučić’s accusations against Croatia, which he blamed for the “resurgence of Nazism” and for being “proud of its Nazi past”—claims that prompted an immediate response from Prime Minister Andrej Plenković—Fetoshi says they seek to construct Serbian victimhood through a one-sided selection of events from World War II.
A separate chapter of the analysis is devoted to Vučić’s relationship with the United States. Fetoshi believes that the Serbian president sought to divide American policy into two parts: he labels President Clinton as a “destroyer” of the international order, while portraying President Trump in laudatory terms and as a “hope” for correcting that order.
Fetoshi also rejects Belgrade’s claim that Serbia is “neutral.” According to him, the country’s strategic alignment with Russia and China contradicts this declaration, while Serbia also seeks to benefit from the European integration process.
In this context, he describes Vučić as Putin’s “European spokesman” for the narrative of the West’s double standards. Fetoshi adds that the Serbian president’s speech cannot be fully understood without also examining his relationship with the political legacy of Slobodan Milošević.
He draws attention to Vučić’s statements about Milošević in 2018, as well as recent discussions in Serbia about the political rehabilitation of the former Yugoslav president. According to Fetoshi, avoiding responsibility for the Milošević era is linked not only to the way history is interpreted, but also to adapting the Serbian national project to the circumstances of the 21st century.
Fetoshi links this development to the concept of the “Serbian World,” which he describes as a reformulated version of earlier nationalist objectives. Unlike in the past, this project is expressed less through direct statements and more through historical narratives, victimhood, political influence and strategic relations.
In conclusion, the analysis focuses on how politics is conveyed through communication. Referring to George Herbert Mead’s symbolic interactionism, Fetoshi argues that facts do not acquire political meaning on their own; that meaning is created through the way they are interpreted and placed within a particular framework. According to him, this is precisely what explains the importance of Vučić’s strategy.
Fetoshi notes that in the digital reality of the “post-truth” era, court documents and historical reports may fail to reach the public, while political interpretations of the past can be reformatted to suit new audiences.
In response to this, he cites Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports on Kosovo, ICTY rulings, as well as the cases of mass graves in Batajnica, Petrovo Selo and Rudnica. According to him, these constitute a documentary counterweight to the narrative that portrays NATO’s intervention as the West’s “Sin.” “The continuous communication of facts, with their meaning proven by justice and documented by the media, is the best formula for deconstructing Vučić’s ‘narrative trap,’” Fetoshi wrote.
