"Serbia is the only country in Europe that has not imposed sanctions on Russia" — Serbian President Vucic
Although Vucic's remarks sound a little sad, the Serbian people must be full of pride and pride in this, because in the eyes of the Serbian people, this is their best support and retribution for their Russian friends, which fully demonstrates serbia's national integrity.
After the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, Western countries have condemned and sanctioned Russia, and most European countries have also stood on the side of the United States and NATO to oppose Russia's "invasion" of Ukraine, which is also a European country and pro-Russian Serbia, which undoubtedly bears huge pressure from the West.
In order to force Serbia to put pressure on Russia, the United States and other Western countries have tried to coerce Serbia to bow down on the Kosovo issue, EU membership and economic interests, and Ukrainian officials have also asked Serbia to make a clear statement, but Serbia still resisted the pressure and resolutely refused to yield to Western countries.
Within a day of the conflict, Vucic said Serbia respected Ukraine's territorial sovereignty and that it was "wrong" for Russia to launch a special military campaign against Ukraine. Ukraine and Serbia are friendly countries, and we are very sorry about what happened to Ukraine, but we have no intention of sanctioning Russia for this.
Because Russia did not participate in the sanctions against Serbia in the 1990s, and it also spoke out on behalf of Serbia at the United Nations to safeguard our territorial sovereignty. Serbia respects international law, but at the same time we also know that sanctions against Russia are not in our national interest.
Vucic's words are very blunt, and each sentence is a big truth based on facts. Serbia has always maintained good relations with Ukraine and Russia, and although Russia and Ukraine are moving towards a rupture, relations between Serbia and Serbia have not been greatly affected by this, and the two countries remain friendly.
Ukraine's current pain Serbia has been experienced in the 90s, and it is more able to understand Ukraine's mood and situation at this time. Although Serbia respects Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity, Russia is also a friend of Serbia and has helped Serbia in the most difficult moments.
The international environment facing Serbia is not optimistic, Russia is its indispensable and important partner, Russia's selfless support and assistance to Serbia has built a deep friendship between the two peoples, Russia is also known as Serbia's important dependence on the international stage. If the stalemate between the sanctions against Russia and the relations between Russia are tantamount to self-extinction and make Serbia bear the name of ungratefulness, the Serbian people will resolutely not agree.
At a time when the United States and its allies are frantically sanctioning Russia and standing on the "moral high ground" to criticize Russia, the Serbian people are tit-for-tat with it and express their support for Russia in their own way.
On the evening of February 26, Local time in Serbia, in the capital Belgrade, thousands of Serbian people took to the streets and held high the flags of Serbia, Russia and Belarus to express their support for Russia and Belarus, which shows the deep friendship with the Russian people.
So how exactly did the steel friendship between Russia and Cyprus come about?
Some netizens may first think of Russia's support for Serbia's predecessor, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in the Kosovo War. Yes, this has indeed left a strong mark in the history of friendship between the two countries.
In 1999, NATO countries led by the United States tried to remove the last anti-Western Milosevic regime in the Balkans, support Kosovo's independence, promote Western ideology, and crowd out Russia's sphere of influence. An air strike called "Allied Operation" was launched against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which caused more than 7,800 casualties in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the important infrastructure, economic and civilian facilities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were severely hit, causing direct economic losses of up to 200 billion US dollars, and committing heinous crimes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
In the face of bullying by NATO countries and in order to safeguard the common interests of Russia and Cyprus, Russia firmly supports Serbia politically, does not recognize the independence of the Kosovo region, and insists on opposing Kosovo's separatist activities.
With the support of the United States and other Western countries, Kosovo declared independence in 2008, and more than 100 countries in the world declared their independent status, but Russia still used its veto power to refuse Kosovo to enter the United Nations, and worked with China and other countries to fight for Selvet in the international community. Although Serbia lost the war, the friendship between China and Russia is still remembered by the Serbian people, and serbia's relations with China and Russia are getting closer and closer.
It is undeniable that Russia's support for Serbia on the Kosovo issue has indeed had a far-reaching and lasting impact on the friendly development of relations between the two countries, but we cannot attribute all the friendly relations between Russia and Serbia to this, and we cannot view the development of bilateral relations in isolation and staticity.
In my opinion, the friendly relations between Russia and Serbia are more derived from the inheritance of history, the strategic needs of the two countries, and long-term mutual support.
Historically, after a long period of historical evolution, the Slavic peoples continued to migrate, and gradually divided into three sub-ethnic groups: East Slavic, West Slavic and Yugoslav. The East Slavs mainly inhabit the territory of today's Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, and have deep national and cultural ties with each other. Therefore, the Russo-Ukrainian war is to some extent considered to be a fratricide, and Ukraine itself has been integrated and intertwined with Russia for a long time in history.
The West Slavs lived mainly in the three countries of present-day Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and this area was also the traditional "home" of the Slavs, from which all three branches originated. Unlike the Eastern Slavic countries, which practiced Orthodoxy, the Three West Slavic countries were predominantly Catholic.
From the end of the Second World War, Poland and Czechoslovakia established a socialist system and fell to the Soviet Union, but after the end of the Cold War, because Czechoslovakia was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire for a long time in history and gradually assimilated by the Germans, the region quickly fell to the West in the upheavals of Eastern Europe, joined the European Union and NATO, and gradually drifted away from the Slavic brother countries and threw itself into the embrace of the West.
The Yugoslavs, mainly distributed in the Balkan Peninsula and the surrounding areas, have long been oppressed by the Ottomans and Germans in history, and Yugoslavia gained independence after World War II, but since 1991, Yugoslavia has been divided into 7 countries, serbia is one of them.
It can be seen from this that although Serbia and Russia are separated by thousands of miles from the south and the north, they are still distant relatives, and the two peoples have a common ancestor, the same Orthodox Church, and a strong sense of mutual identity and innate closeness.
Since it is your own person, you have to help. Historically, Serbia's strength is obviously inferior to Russia's, and Serbia itself is weak, so it is always bullied by powerful neighboring countries. At the end of the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire conquered Serbia and began a five-century-long feudal military rule, but the Serbian people were indomitable and always insisted on fighting the Ottoman Empire in pursuit of their independence and liberation.
Through two revolutions in the early 19th century, Serbia gradually emerged from the control of the Ottoman Empire and gained a high degree of autonomy. At this time, Russia also saw the opportunity to pull Serbia's little brother together, and in 1878, helped Serbia completely get rid of the control of the Ottoman Empire and achieve complete independence. After the founding of the country, Serbia grew rapidly, and through two Balkan wars, it annexed the surrounding Kosovo, Macedonia and other regions, becoming a balkan power.
But the Serbian nationalist Princip rewrote serbian history with an M1900 automatic pistol. The assassination of Crown Prince Ferdinand of austria-Hungary became the trigger for the outbreak of the First World War, and Austria-Hungary immediately declared war on Serbia, although Serbia stubbornly resisted, but in the end it was unable to stop the fierce attack of the "Allied Powers" coalition of Austria-Hungary and Germany and Bulgaria, and serbia fell all over its territory.
With the military victory of the Allies with Russia, France and Britain as the core against the Allies, directly helping Serbia to recover as a victorious power, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Serbia and Montenegro and Slovenia, Croatia and other regions under the jurisdiction of the original Austro-Hungarian Empire jointly formed a new kingdom, which is the predecessor of Yugoslavia. Russia's military victory in the First World War undoubtedly played a catalytic role in this historical process, and the Balkans have since moved towards unity.
After World War II, Stalin sent the Soviet Red Army into Yugoslavia, helped Tito become the supreme leader of Yugoslavia, established the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and stabilized the political situation in Yugoslavia. Under Tito's leadership and reforms, Yugoslavia became a wealthier presence in the socialist countries.
Historically, Russia's help and support for Serbia was a necessity for Russia's expansion strategy. Russia has always had a dream of naval power, but it has always suffered from the lack of access to the Indian Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean, most of Russia's coastline faces the Arctic Ocean, there are very few natural non-freezing ports, and it often encounters blockades and blockades of the sea outlets by hostile countries. Russia also hopes to benefit from Serbia's expansion in the Balkans, and use military cooperation with Serbia to strengthen its naval strategic deployment in the Mediterranean and enhance its ability to enter the Indian and Atlantic Oceans.
In order to control the Black Sea and Crimea, Russia once opened up shipping routes to the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, and had many wars in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, although it controlled Crimea and the Black Sea, it was never able to open up the shipping route to the Mediterranean Sea. Serbia's growing power was able to cooperate with Russia's efforts against the common enemy of Ottoman Turkey, thus gaining further control over the estuary to the Mediterranean Sea.
In 1991, the former Yugoslavia split into seven countries, with all but Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina joining NATO. Serbia will not forget the blood debt owed by NATO to it, still less will it forget the inseparability of China, Russia and other countries, and it will repeatedly say that it will not join NATO and will never be an enemy of China and Russia.
As the only "ally" in southern Europe, Russia has done its best to help Serbia improve its defense and military capabilities, investing $1.4 billion to insert the "Turkish Flow" gas pipeline into Serbia and actively promoting energy cooperation between the two countries.
In the face of the sudden outbreak of the new crown epidemic, Serbia's own medical conditions are limited, and it has to ask for help from developed countries in Europe and the United States, but European and American countries only care about their own country's epidemic prevention situation, and no country has extended a helping hand to Serbia.
Serbia was forced to turn to China and Russia for help. China and Russia, which received the request for help, acted quickly, and in the face of the huge pressure of the domestic fight against the epidemic, sent a team of experts to the medical team to carry a large number of anti-epidemic materials to Serbia for support. China also provided a large number of vaccines to Serbia at the first time, making Serbia the country with the highest vaccination rate.
History has proved that compared with the arrogance and arrogance of Western countries, China and Russia are the true friends of Serbia in suffering and sharing. The relations between Russia and China and Cyprus and between China and Russia have been tempered and tempered into steel, and each other has condensed into a friendship like steel.