Bosnia & Herzegovina has been dragged to the brink of collapse by the actions of separatist Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik. 

He and his SNSD party have moved to either quit, ignore or block the work of state-level institutions and the international community’s high representative, in the most radical steps towards the breakup of the country so far. 

There are suspicions that Dodik stepped up his activity with encouragement from Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose loyal supporter Dodik is. He met twice with Putin recently, in visits condemned by Bosnia’s Western partners. 

Dodik is president of Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia’s two autonomous entities. He has long called for the entity to secede from Bosnia and unite instead with Serbia. 

Both Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation have their own institutions. There are also state-level bodies, as well as international community’s high representative who has special Bonn powers to block or amend legislation in case it violates the country’s constitution or the Dayton peace agreement that ended the bloody 1992-1995 Bosnian war.

As well as Dodik’s political moves, there have been several reports by US experts in recent years that Moscow has been secretly providing weapons and military training to paramilitary groups in Republika Srpska. 

Steps towards secession?

The SNSD, which is the ruling party in Republika Srpska, recently moved forward several key acts aimed at quitting state-level institutions and blocking their work.

On June 21, the entity’s government adopted legislation stating that acts announced by High Representative Christian Schmidt will no longer be published in the entity’s State Gazette. It was backed by the votes of 54 out of 62 MPs in Republika Srpska’s parliament.

This effectively means the entity is blocking the implementation of Schmidt’s acts, even though it is obliged to adopt them under the Dayton peace accord.

Dodik and other SNSD leaders, urging MPs to back the legislation ahead of the vote, claimed that Schmidt is not a legitimate high representative as he was not elected according to the procedure. On his appointment in May 2021, both Dodik and the Russian embassy in Sarajevo said his appointment was illegitimate. This, according to the secessionist leader, makes Schmidt’s acts invalid.

“Is it … normal that his decisions are published in the Official Gazette based on the valid laws in Republika Srpska? Of course it is not,” Republika Srpska’s parliament speaker Nenad Stevandic told the assembly.

Constitutional court challenged 

Dodik has also sought to block the work of the state-level constitutional court, and has threatened that Republika Srpska will stop recognising its rulings altogether. 

In April, Republika Srpska’s parliament ordered its judges in the court to quit. Under the rules at the time that meant it would no longer be able to operate, as sessions have to be postponed if at least three judges selected by the parliament of the Federation and/or at least one judge selected by Republika Srpska's National Assembly are absent.

In response, the court decided to remove the article from its regulations. 

That angered Dodik, who gave the court a deadline until June 23 to give up the decision and threatened that otherwise Republika Srpska’s parliament will adopt an urgent decision not to recognise the court’s rulings. If taken, that would be a significant step towards secession. 

“Secessionist Dodik now explicitly trying to destroy the BiH Constitutional Court, a direct assault on BiH’s legal foundations. Hard not to read Western silence — especially as compared to their livid [reactions] to [Kosovan Prime Minister Albin Kurti] — as complicity. Especially by [Office of the High Representative] OHR BiH,” political analyst Jasmin Mujanovic commented on Twitter.

He added that Dodik has already largely succeeded in creating a legal vacuum in Bosnia in coordination with Dragan Covic, the leader of the main Croat HDZ BiH party. The SNSD and HDZ BiH have been coalition partners for years.

“The Constitutional Court, despite its pro-HDZ slant, remains a core institution of the Bosnian state that must be defended,” Mujanovic noted.

International community sees no real threat

Despite Dodik’s clear steps towards secession, the international community still insists there is no direct threat of Republika Srpska’s secession, or a military conflict.

In April, the EU’s delegation to Bosnia said that Dodik’s secessionist threats are unrealistic and groundless and urged Dodik to stick to his promise to work for Bosnia’s EU’s accession.

The EUFOR’s Althea mission to Bosnia also has said there are no signs of a real threat to the peace in the country.

However, Dodik’s visits to Kremlin have intensified and, apart from public statements on joint energy projects and support to Putin’s war in Ukraine, experts suspect there might be something else the two leaders are discussing.

In March, the influential Centre for Security Studies (CSS) in Bosnia urged Schmidt to remove Dodik, warning that failure to do so could result in a new Bosnian war.

The CSS made the appeal after Dodik announced plans for restrictive new legislation on LGBT activists and journalists, which followed on from proposed legislation on NGOs apparently inspired by a similar law in Putin’s Russia. All three steps appeared to be a challenge to the authority of the state-level institutions in Sarajevo. 

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Bosnia was seen as one of the potential flashpoints where Moscow could seek to spark instability or another conflict within Europe.

Back in 2018, the Penn Biden Center warned that Russia could easily ignite a new conflict in Bosnia and use it to destabilise the region if Europe decided to impose more sanctions against Moscow. At the time, Michael Carpenter, the former US deputy assistant secretary of defence for Russia, Eastern Europe and the Balkans who is now senior director for diplomacy and global engagement at the Penn Biden Center, said he believed Dodik would not try to push his entity towards secession without Moscow’s support.

“They [Russia] are his primary backers. And from the Kremlin’s prospective they are satisfied with the status quo, they don’t want Bosnia & Herzegovina to enter either the EU or, God forbid from their prospective, Nato. They like the status quo because essentially RS [Republika Srpska] has a veto over the country’s geopolitical direction,” Carpenter said at the time.

“However, if Russia feels that its back is up against the wall, that European sanctions for example are being increased perhaps in totally different context than Ukraine or something else, he [Putin] has Bosnia & Herzegovina always readily available … where he can just press the button and really destabilise the situation in the region,” Carpenter added.

Five years on, Russia is in precisely that position, with a full-scale war in Ukraine and multiple packages of sanctions imposed by Western governments.

Also in 2018, the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) released a report that claimed Moscow was helping the Serb-dominated entity in its efforts at militarisation, aiming to divide the country. According to that report, Dodik was arming and equipping Republika Srpska's police and related security forces with military-grade weaponry and training them with the assistance of Russia, aiming to secure the future separation of the entity from Bosnia.

The following year, Republika Srpska officially revealed its new armed police unit, after backing off from its plan to form a reservist police unit several months earlier.

There have also been several reports from US sources saying that Russia has been secretly funding Dodik for years.