Bosnia's dysfunction is hampering efforts to limit Moscow's influence in the Balkans
Already struggling to contain persistent crises in the Middle East and Ukraine, the United States is also grappling with a standoff in the Balkans over a gas pipeline to Bosnia, an issue that carries major geopolitical stakes.
The project, backed by both the United States and the European Union but blocked by the ethnic feuds that have long gripped Bosnia, aims to loosen Moscow's stranglehold on gas supplies to a fragile nation caught between East and West to break through.
The proposed pipeline, which would bring natural gas from neighboring Croatia, a member of NATO and the European Union, would be just 100 miles long and cost about $110 million, a pittance next to the $15 billion needed to build the Nord Stream . gas connection between Russia and Germany.
But it would seriously reduce Moscow's influence in a highly volatile region. Russia frequently used its control over energy supplies as a weapon against Ukraine in the years leading up to its full-scale invasion in February 2022, and has since used it to undermine European unity by offering sweetheart energy deals to countries like Hungary and Serbia.
Russia has no territorial claims on Bosnia or other Balkan countries, and its main goal has been to prevent them from integrating with the West.
The stalled pipeline “is much more important than just Bosnia and Herzegovina or the future infrastructure in a small Balkan country,” said Vesna Pusic, a former Croatian foreign minister who helped her country enter the European Union in 2013.
“This is about closing the avenues for Russia's destabilizing influence in Europe,” Ms. Pusic said in an interview. “The big road is of course Ukraine, and this is a small one. But if it is not closed, it will grow” and radiate instability across and beyond the Balkans, she added.
Unlike other European countries that diversified energy supplies after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Bosnia has remained completely dependent on Moscow for its natural gas.
Without alternative supplies from the West, James C. O'Brien, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, said in a telephone interview: “Bosnia is in danger of falling behind and becoming particularly vulnerable” to Moscow's pressure .
Mr O'Brien visited the Bosnian capital Sarajevo this month as part of US efforts to get the pipeline moving from Croatia, draw politicians out of their domestic feuds and weaken Russian influence. “This is a vulnerability that needs to be closed,” Mr O'Brien said.
Bosnia's main energy sources are hydropower and local coal. But while natural gas from Russia makes up less than 5 percent of the country's total energy mix, it helps power a major aluminum factory and the heating plants that keep Sarajevo warm in winter.
The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a fragile amalgam of areas inhabited by Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats, few of whom are religiously faithful. The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina has lurched from crisis to crisis since 1995, when the Dayton Peace Accords ended years of bloodshed in the country. the former Yugoslavia.
The peace deal ended wars in the early 1990s that killed some 100,000 people, but left Bosnia with an extensive and highly dysfunctional political system. The country is divided into two largely self-governing 'entities': a Muslim-Croat federation and a predominantly Serb area called Republika Srpska.
This rickety, disjointed structure is headed by a weak central government with three presidents, one for each ethnic group, who are supposed to share power but whose political leaders thrive on fomenting division.
Republika Srpska, led by a militant Serbian nationalist, Milorad Dodik, has repeatedly threatened to secede, a move that would risk a new round of bloodshed. Mr Dodik, a regular visitor to Russia, most recently on Wednesday, before meetings with President Vladimir V. Putin, is pushing for a separate pipeline project that would increase gas supplies from Russia. His fiefdom has its own gas company, Gas-Res, controlled by ethnic Serbs, and a Russian-owned oil refinery that relies on Russian crude.
Bosnia's ethnic Croat leader Dragan Covic says he supports the proposed western pipeline but wants it to be placed under the control of a company run by ethnic Croats rather than Bosnia's existing pipeline operator. BH Gas, which is based in Sarajevo. and run by Bosnians. The company that Mr Covic wants to set up would be based in the Bosnian city of Mostar, an ethnically mixed city but long a stronghold of Croatian chauvinism.
The bickering prompted an unusually blunt intervention from Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken last month. In letters to the foreign ministers of Bosnia and Croatia, Mr. Blinken blasted Mr. Covic for obstructing “a critical project.” His demands for a new, ethnic Croatian company, he said, “are ambiguous, economically unviable and endanger the entire project.”
“Such blatant corruption and self-dealing could jeopardize Bosnia's hopes of one day joining the European Union,” Mr Blinken added.
Mr. O'Brien, the assistant secretary of state, declined to say whether the Croatian and Bosnian foreign ministers had responded to Mr. Blinken's broadside, citing diplomatic confidentiality. Both ministers declined to be interviewed.
Mr Covic, who also declined to be interviewed, has said he only wants to protect legitimate Croatian interests and not block Bosnia's path to the European Union.
Nihada Glamoc, director of BH Gas, acknowledged that most of her company's executives and employees were Bosniaks, but said there was no need for a new Croatian-led pipeline operator.
“It's all purely political,” she said, noting that her only interest was ensuring a “diverse and stable energy supply.”
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 build an alternative to bring in more Russian gas as “a model of Bosnia's dysfunction. ”
“Everything in this country is based on ethnic differentiation, even gas,” he said, adding: “Our politicians have divided everything that could possibly be divided and placed every part under their command. It defies all economic logic.”
The row has not only hampered joint action in the interest of the entire country, Mr. Cicic said, but also created fertile ground for Russia to advance its interests.
“Bosnia is the dividing point between East and West – the point where Russia can easily cause instability through people like Dodik,” Mr Cicic said.
Mr Dodik, he added, may be the most open in expressing his desire to redraw Bosnia's borders and keep the country out of the European Union, but he is not the only one who is bigoted about ethnic and often promotes corrupt interests, with the risk of causing tensions and even corruption. violent conflict.
“Unfortunately, we have a lot of Dodiks here,” he said.
The European Union accepted Bosnia as a 'candidate country' in 2022, as part of its efforts to weaken Russian influence in the Balkans following the invasion of Ukraine. But formal negotiations have not yet begun and the European bloc's executive branch arrived in November gave a bleak picture of the prospects for Bosnia, saying the country had made “no progress” in the fight against corruption and was delaying the “socio-economic reforms” demanded by Brussels.
The idea of building a pipeline to bring gas from neighboring Croatia has been around for almost fifteen years, since Russia cut off gas supplies through Ukraine to the Balkans in 2009 and Sarajevo shivered in sub-zero temperatures for days.
“We were very scared by the 2009 shutdown and realized that we had no energy security,” recalls Almir Becarevic, director of BH Gas at the time.
For years, Gazprom, Russia's energy giant, seemed like “just a normal company selling gas,” but “it became increasingly clear that Gazprom was playing political games.” Gas, he added, “grew into a big geopolitical thing.”
Mr Becarevic and others began lobbying for a pipeline from Croatia to end Russia's monopoly, but made little progress even after the 2021 opening of a facility on an island off the Croatian coast to supply liquefied natural gas.
“For years there was nothing but blah, blah, blah,” Mr. Becarevic said. “But the war in Ukraine changed everything. The situation has now changed 100 percent.”