From Belgrade, with Love: A Love Letter to Modern-Day Dictatorship
- Maja the Lepa Girlboss
- 2 days ago
- 10 min read
When you think of communism, your brain probably flashes red—Russia, Cuba, some other comrade-friendly utopia that aged like spoiled milk. Mention dictatorship, and Kim Jong Un’s gravity-defying haircut usually makes a cameo. In those places, oppression at least has the decency to be honest about itself. You know who’s in charge, and they don’t bother pretending otherwise. But what happens when a regime figures out how to Photoshop its tyranny into “democracy”? When the dictator swaps the military jacket for a tailored suit and starts quoting human rights conventions between propaganda speeches?
Now imagine that charming little façade not in some faraway, isolated land—but right in the heart of Europe. Picture it smiling for photo ops with EU officials, waving its forged democratic credentials while quietly suffocating dissent at home. No need to imagine too hard. Let's take a closer look at the Serbian government for example.
Anyone remotely literate in Balkan history probably assumed Slobodan Milošević’s reign of terror would remain the country’s permanent scar. Turns out, history doesn’t repeat; it just mutates. Fast-forward a few decades and the man who once served as Milošević’s Minister of Information now sits on the throne himself. The current President of Serbia—or, as he’s affectionately called at home, the “Great Leader” (Vreme, 2025).
He took old-school brutality, polished it with PR, weaponized media, and rebranded it as progress. Under his reign, dictatorship didn’t disappear, it evolved: smarter, sleeker, endlessly more deceitful. Everyone sees it. Everyone knows it. And yet, somehow, nobody dares to name it. As a Serbian who has watched this unfold firsthand, I know some will dismiss my perspective as personal bias. That’s why I’ll stick to a concise, evidence-based snapshot—just a few well-documented instances of institutional corruption and misconduct under the current leadership. Think of it as a sampler platter of corruption. This article is dedicated to the skeptics, the so-called neutrals. Its purpose is simple: to strip away euphemisms and show, in stark clarity, what the vast majority of Serbian citizens are living every single day.
For those who don’t live in Serbia, or who haven’t been paying attention, this is a window into reality—what life under this regime actually looks like.
Those living it don’t need the recap. They already know. What they’re asking themselves is: “How did we even get here? How did we normalize this political descent and call it progress? When did we trade citizenship for servitude and start applauding our own captivity?”
When did we become so silent? It seems to me it was a slow erosion, one headline at a time, one small humiliation at a time, one televised lie repeated until it sounded almost reasonable. The truth is this: yes, we, the Serbian people, allowed it. And now we’re left wondering when consent turned into compliance, and how we can fix it.
Since the beginning of its rule, the regime has systematically undermined state institutions. The criticisms of the lack of merit-based recruitment highlighted a high number of ‘acting’ senior civil service positions. Research has shown that many top appointments are based on party loyalty rather than professional competence (BCSP, 2025).
This politicisation has opened the door to clientelism: roles sometimes go to individuals with questionable qualifications, reinforcing regime control over public administration. These are not supermarket jobs. These are vital positions in healthcare, police, the military, construction, and the intelligence services, led by a parade of colourful incompetents.
Between 2017 and 2022, for example, the Head of the Security Intelligence Agency had zero prior experience in the field (Balkan Insight, 2017). On one occasion in the Serbian Parliament, he openly stated to opposition MPs that he saw nothing wrong with having sold coffee and laid tiles. A tiler as the Head of the Security Intelligence Agency (FoNet, 2017) Grotesque, isn’t it?
The real problem is that this is not an isolated incident. The same pattern has persisted across all ministries for over a decade (NISPAcee, 2023). Institutions are now rotten beyond measure.
Since 2016, Serbia has witnessed a series of scandals and criminal episodes that reveal the depth of corruption, impunity, and state capture under the current regime. The Savamala affair marked the beginning of this trajectory.
In April 2016, masked men demolished and vandalized buildings in Belgrade’s Savamala district, a key redevelopment zone. Investigations, including leaked footage and journalistic reporting, implicated construction tycoons with ties to the government, exposing direct or tacit state involvement and symbolizing the erosion of rule-of-law mechanisms (Rujevic, 2016).
Two years later, on 16 January 2018, Kosovo-Serb politician Oliver Ivanović was assassinated in North Mitrovica in a drive-by shooting (The Guardian, 2018).
The case has revealed the depth of entrenched corruption. The 2019 indictment charged several Kosovo Police officers with assisting the murder and manipulating evidence, outlining an organised criminal network that had allegedly been operating since 2014 (EULEX Kosovo, 2021). Critics say (Bugaqku, 2024) the prosecution failed to bring the most powerful suspects to justice — notably Milan Radoičić and Zvonko Veselinović — pointing to opaque connections between political actors, security services, and criminal groups.
A different instance is former Serbian parliamentarian Vladimir Cvijan. He abruptly disappeared from public view in 2014. It was only in 2021 that it emerged he had died in early 2018, and authorities had concealed this for years, fueling suspicions of covert elimination and systemic cover-ups (Balkan Insight, 2021).
In 2019, the Jovanjica cannabis plantation scandal (Amerhauser et al., 2021) exposed another dimension of corruption and collusion between organized crime and state actors. The raid revealed that businessmen with close ties to political elites operated under alleged protection from police and intelligence services.
Trials and contested evidence rulings have kept the case in public discourse, emphasizing how criminality and political influence intertwine (Dragojlo, 2021). Similarly, the activities of Veljko Belivuk and his criminal organization, linked to football hooligan circles, involved kidnappings, torture, and multiple murders. Investigative reporting, particularly from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, suggested possible protection or links between Belivuk’s network and political authorities (Fruscione, 2021).
Opposition politician Nikola Sandulović became a prominent example of extreme state repression. In one high-profile incident, he was illegally kidnapped by the Serbian Intelligence Agency (BIA) in a black van outside his home, beaten, and transported to the official BIA building, where the assault was reportedly recorded. The attack left him with broken ribs, resulted in clinical death requiring hospitalization, and caused complete paralysis of the right side of his body for six months (O'Carroll, 2024). Alexander Vulin, at the time a former Chief of the Secret Service, publicly admitted that the “interrogation” had been carried out on his orders (Taylor-Braçe, 2024). Vulin is known for his close ties to Russia (Ivković, 2023).
He has received a Russian state medal raising questions about how a national security official with access to all critical intelligence in Serbia could be honored by a foreign power. Coincidentally, the medal awarded to Vulin is called the “Cooperation Medal” (Sarajevo Times, 2024).
This was not Sandulović’s first ordeal: in 2020, he was allegedly poisoned with a military-grade agent while in detention, leaving him on the brink of death, again without family being notified (HOP, 2020). These incidents, combined with Sandulović’s other claims of kidnapping, torture, and ill-treatment, were submitted to the European Union and United Nations human-rights mechanisms, though Serbian authorities officially denied misconduct.
In parallel, the Krušik arms-trade scandal exposed entrenched systemic corruption within Serbia’s defense sector (Janjevic, 2019). Investigations documented preferential deals granted to politically connected intermediaries and chronic failures in oversight at the state-owned weapons manufacturer, raising significant concerns about transparency, accountability, and the manipulation of public resources for private or political gain (Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa, 2019).
The Banjska attack in September 2023 further demonstrated the dangers of armed political extremism. Ethnic-Serb militants attacked Kosovo police in northern Kosovo, resulting in deaths and injuries. Arrests followed, and Kosovo authorities implicated Serbian political or paramilitary actors, raising concerns about potential state links to militia activity (EWB, 2025).
In November 2024, the collapse of a newly renovated concrete canopy at Novi Sad railway station killed 15 civilians and triggered nationwide protests over corruption in public works projects. Prosecutors charged 13 officials, including former ministers and project supervisors, highlighting failures in oversight and the risks of cutting corners during large infrastructure projects, including those linked to Chinese contractors (Kaufman, 2024).
Throughout this period, investigative journalists in Serbia have faced systematic attacks, smear campaigns, and intimidation. According to the Media Freedom Rapid Response report, KRIK and BIRN contributors have documented coordinated efforts to suppress reporting on corruption, organized crime, and state wrongdoing, illustrating the broader erosion of democratic norms and the consolidation of power through both legal and extralegal means (MFRR, 2025).
The collapse of the Novi Sad railway station canopy triggered a wave of resistance against repression and corruption. The regime immediately revealed its true face, signaling to the population that concepts such as human rights, freedom of thought, and freedom of speech do not exist. The government, led by its “great leader,” kept demonstrating that it would crush anyone opposing its power to remain unaccountable.
Protests grew increasingly massive and frequent, yet media coverage often ignored events drawing over a million people to the streets of Belgrade (Kljajic, 2025). Every demonstration was met with violence from police and paramilitary secret-service units operating solely in the dictator’s interest rather than the state or the public. On March 15, during the largest protest in Serbian history, a sound cannon was fired in the middle of sixteen minutes of silence for the fallen civilians, an unmistakable warning that anyone opposing the leader could die on the street, whether from a “stumble” or some other orchestrated accident (Kljajić,2025).
Students were arrested, beaten, and in some cases suffered broken jaws, threats of sexual assault, or indefinite detention (UN Human Rights, Office of the High Commissioner, 2025). Those who represented what little integrity remained in the country were now being targeted, and many feared for their lives. The regime’s response was to deny all incidents outright: no sound cannon, no beatings, no million-strong protests, no canopy collapse; any evidence of theft was recast as “state sabotage” (Baletic & Stojanovic, 2025). To compound the absurdity, the government even organized counter-protests to suppress demonstrations, creating a vicious cycle of denial, repression, and manufactured legitimacy (Al Jazeera, 2025)
Corruption from within is one thing; corruption from the outside is another. International institutions, including the European Union, have been taking their time before implementing any concrete measures (Cerimagic, 2025).
Serbia has been a candidate for EU membership since 2012. How many more years will it remain merely a candidate while pursuing policies that openly contradict European norms?
Questions about the allocation and use of EU funds remain critical. It is both ironic and absurd that a country receiving substantial European support refuses to sanction Russia (Agatonović, 2022) and even manipulates energy deals to avoid antagonizing Moscow (News Agencies, 2025).
Serbia positions itself as a “mini-China” (Vladisavljev, 2022) operating according to principles diametrically opposed to European standards, yet claims to aspire to EU membership. This raises fundamental questions—not only for Serbia but also for the European Union itself—about the credibility and enforcement of European integration criteria.
If international institutions keep dragging their feet while “mini-China” runs wild in the heart of Europe, perhaps it’s time we pen another article dedicated entirely to the art of corruption.
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