Vladimir Putin has said who he hopes will govern Serbia after October 25. Belgrade is now after the American half of the picture, and it is offering applause for it.
By Mark Gojcaj |US Desk | 4 October 2026
On October 1 Vladimir Putin said at Valdai that he hopes Aleksandar Vučić will be Serbia's next prime minister. He praised Vučić's willingness to cooperate with Russia and promised to respond in kind. Five days earlier the two men had spoken by phone, and the Kremlin's readout recorded that both consider outside interference in elections unacceptable. The next day Vučić resigned the presidency to head his party's list. Serbia votes on October 25.
That is one half of a campaign photograph. Vučić has been after the other half for more than a year. In May 2025 he flew to Florida saying he would meet Donald Trump twice, fell ill, and went home without the meeting. His government gave the President's son-in-law a 99-year lease on Belgrade's bombed army headquarters for a Trump-branded tower and passed a special law to clear the site. Serbian prosecutors later charged a cabinet minister and other officials over alleged abuses and document falsification in removing the site's protected status. Jared Kushner's firm, which was not accused and said it had no part in it, walked away last December.
Since then the currency has been praise. On May 31 Vučić told Breitbart that Trump is far and away the most popular American leader in Serbia in a very long time, and that "at least 100,000 people" would turn out for him in Belgrade. The President posted the interview on Truth Social. On June 10 Vučić told Fox News the crowd would be "more than hundreds of thousands of people." On July 6 the President posted that one too. In Belgrade each repost ran as a headline on Tanjug and on the state broadcaster. The message reached the reader who mattered. The reposts were then made into news for the voters at home.
Serbia has spent $3.2 million on Washington lobbyists since mid-2023, almost half of it in the first year of this administration, by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network's count of the foreign-agent filings. As of February two of the three firms included men from the President's own world: Valcour, run by Matt Mowers, and BGR, where former Trump campaign official David Urban is a director. I do not know who put two Serbian interviews in front of the President. I know who is paid to open doors.
The method tells you what Belgrade thinks of him. Praise the President, promise him the biggest crowd he has ever seen, and turn his repost into campaign material at home. Belgrade has concluded that the President of the United States can be had for a crowd estimate. That is a strange reading of a man whose whole case to American voters was that foreigners had smiled at their leaders and walked off with the store.
The analyst Ivana Stradner has now posted what she identifies as a passage by the Russian commentator Igor Pshenichnikov. It claims that Serbia's foreign minister is working influential Serbian-Americans and offering "any money" for some kind of Trump meeting, so that Serbs see their man received by both Putin and Trump. I cannot verify the allegation. What interests me is the purpose Pshenichnikov assigns to it: in his telling, a photograph with the American president is the second prop. Washington is one of the audiences.
I am for a deal with Serbia, and I said so here on Thursday. A deal has two columns.
Since January the Treasury has kept alive, a month at a time, a Serbian oil company it sanctioned because Gazprom and its affiliates control it. On September 15 the State Department told Congress that "our efforts are working." On September 23 Secretary Rubio said Washington intends to deepen the strategic partnership. On September 30 the Treasury extended the oil waiver again, to October 30, five days after the vote. Two House Republicans, Joe Wilson and Keith Self, had written to Secretary Bessent the week before asking him to reconsider.
The refinery is still Russian. In January Hungary's MOL signed to buy the Gazprom stake, while Viktor Orbán governed in Budapest. Orbán lost in April. On September 8 his successor expelled ten Russian diplomats. On September 20 Vučić said there were calculations about "who is in power in Hungary, who is not." In the same interview he said the Russians "would like to keep it under their control." On October 1 Forbes Srbija reported, from a source close to the Serbian government, that the sale had practically collapsed and that Gazprom was buying time. MOL says the process continues. I would like to know whether that sale was ever meant to remove Russia or only the Russian nameplate.
Vučić has told his own voters how he handled Washington's cleaner offer. By his account the Americans said: nationalize the company and there will be no sanctions. He declined.
On September 29, two weeks after the Department warned Congress that Serbia's Chinese arms "could jeopardize" American defense cooperation, the Serbian army announced that the logistics force of the People's Liberation Army was inside its logistics system, exchanging experience on transport, supply and maintenance. Late that night, Flightradar24's log shows, an Egyptian Air Force Il-76 left Islamabad for Serbia's main military air base. It landed the next afternoon. Its sister aircraft has flown the China run to that base all year. No one has said what it carried. Vučić said in June that Serbia would acquire China's long-range HQ-9.
For the waivers, the testimony and the Secretary's pledge, Washington can point to a shareholders' agreement with MOL and a ceremony for Volodymyr Zelensky. Russia can point to a refinery it still controls. China can point to the air defenses already in Serbian service and to its logisticians inside the Serbian system.
A photograph with the American president is the most valuable thing Washington has left in this negotiation. Putin has already supplied his half. Behind it sit Serbia's only refinery and a candidate Moscow has said in public it hopes will win. Belgrade wants the American half and is offering applause for it. In a deal, you get paid before the photograph. In a con, the photograph is the payment.
Mark Gojcaj writes from New York, where he analyzes the intersection between American conservatism and the political and security realities of Southeast Europe. He is a regular contributor to The Kosovo Dispatch on transatlantic coverage, focusing on U.S. foreign policy, NATO dynamics, and the Western Balkans.
