The greatest concern right now, however, is the threat to the Balkans posed by clandestine Kremlin spy-games that I’ve termed
Special War: espionage, subversion, propaganda and terrorism. Back in November, operatives
linked to Russian intelligence attempted to stage a violent coup in Montenegro, the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic on the Adriatic which is seeking NATO membership, and politicians in Belgrade who are less than enthusiastic about getting in bed with Moscow consider such shadowy assassins to be a threat to themselves too. Given Putin’s habit of disposing of people he dislikes in
unpleasantly nefarious ways, this appears to be a legitimate worry.
What Putin wants in the Balkans seems plain enough, namely political chaos that will distract the West, which made itself the region’s ward in the 1990s. He will happily risk a local war to achieve that, since it won’t be Russians doing most of the dying. The political solutions crafted by NATO a generation ago are increasingly frail, and Moscow plans to reap its reward. Putin, like many Russians, views Western intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo as an affront to the Slavic Orthodox world, and he plans on revenge.
Right now, NATO is deploying troops in Poland and the Baltics to deter Russian adventurism, as I’ve been counseling
for years, but Kremlin saber-rattling in 2017 to test the Alliance’s resolve may instead come in the Balkans, where states are weak and Western control looks shaky. Given how terrifically badly things went
the last time Russian intelligence aided and abetted clandestine Serbian machinations in Bosnia, the United States and our European allies need to urgently calm down Southeastern Europe before its problems get out of hand and mass violence returns to that perennially troubled region.