In the speech announcing his invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin took only minutes to arrive at the original sin in his catalogue of Western crimes. Before Iraq, before Libya, before Syria, came Belgrade: “First a bloody military operation was waged against Belgrade, without the U.N. Security Council’s sanction but with combat aircraft and missiles used in the heart of Europe.” The placement was not incidental, as Putin was telling Serbs that Russia’s war in Ukraine and NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia belonged to the same story, and that he, unlike the West, remembered. Aleksandar Vučić has been telling Serbs the same story for 15 years.

The vocabulary shared by Russia and Serbia is the most important thing to understand about Serbia today. The regime that developed this vocabulary built its domestic legitimacy on portraying every challenge, let it be opposition protest, independent journalism, civic mobilization, or a foreign-engineered Maidan Revolution. In April 2026, that arrangement entered a new phase: Viktor Orbán, after 16 years in power, conceded defeat to Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, which won a supermajority on a campaign focused on inflation, stagnation, and elite corruption. Within 24 hours, Magyar publicly hinted that he knew who the “godfather” behind the Orbán-Fico-Vučić alliance was. Aleksandar Vučić, who had spent election eve thanking Orbán “for everything” on Instagram, snapped on state television, stating that Magyar’s remarks were “foolish and irresponsible.” It was an extraordinary and very illustrative clash that revealed Belgrade’s discontent, as Vučić had just lost the biggest ally willing to shield him in the European Union.

A Shared Vocabulary

Over the last decade, Vučić’s Serbia has perfected what researchers call competitive authoritarianism: a regime that holds elections, tolerates protests, and balances between Brussels and Moscow, while hollowing out every institution that could constrain it. Serbian researchers have shown that the regime’s response to mass protest follows three tactical rules: tolerate them, keep police off the streets, and frame the protesters as instruments of vague but sinister “foreign influence.” Freedom House now classifies Serbia as Partly Free. The V-Dem Institute calls it an electoral autocracy. The European Commission in early 2026 moved to evaluate the suspension of 1.5 billion euros in E.U. funding over rule-of-law concerns, with European Commissioner for Enlargement Marta Kos citing crackdowns on protesters and “recurrent meddling in independent media.”

The infrastructure beneath this performance is harder to see, but highly important to understand. Predrag Petrović has documented how the ruling Serbian Progressive Party captured Serbia’s security and intelligence apparatus immediately upon taking power, beginning with the law that allowed Vučić himself to become secretary of the National Security Council. By 2018, the head of the Security Information Agency’s protection department was declaring publicly at a far-right conference attended by Vučić himself that the agency’s principal task was now defense against “internal enemies”: opposition parties, independent media, non-governmental organizations, and trade unions allegedly serving “foreign agents.”

Political scientists explain that what has happened in Serbia through the systematic takeover of independent institutions, including courts, regulators, and security services, by a ruling party that remains invincible to the law, can be understood as state capture. In the Serbian case, this capture has a digital dimension too: Since 2017, the Chinese company Huawei Technologies has wired Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Niš with a “Safe City” network of facial-recognition cameras, built without any legal basis for biometric surveillance. According to the investigation by Radio Free Europe,  police continue to charge protesters with offenses after demonstrations without ever checking their identification exactly because of the facial recognition network already in place.

In 2022 Vučić installed Aleksandar Vulin, leader of a small pro-Russian party, as the director of the Security Information Agency, despite Western protest. Vulin had already drawn international attention for handing surveillance materials on Russian dissidents in Belgrade to Moscow, which contributed to the arrest of opposition activist Andrei Pivovarov. In December 2021, then-Minister of the Interior Vulin established a joint working group with the Security Council of the Russian Federation. According to the Serbian government, the working group is aimed at developing measures to prevent mass demonstrations, monitor opposition activists, independent journalists, and non-governmental organizations, and to forestall color revolutions that “have already become a traditional policy instrument of certain power centers and countries that aim to undermine statehood and loss of sovereignty under the pretext of democratization.” Putin awarded Vulin the Order of Friendship for maintaining “close ties” between the two countries’ intelligence services. In March 2025, at the height of student protests sparked by the deadly collapse of the Novi Sad railway canopy, Vulin, now deputy prime minister, met with Sergei Shoigu in Moscow to discuss, according to Reuters, “ongoing dialogue” on countering color revolutions in Serbia. The heads of the Russian state and other Kremlin officials have all publicly endorsed the regime’s framing of the protests as the E.U. forces’ attempt to initiate regime change. Researchers show that the Russian regime fully penetrated the Serbian state, its media landscape, and its public discourse. Russia Today and Sputnik Srbija circulate the same vocabulary in Serbian. For example, a recent survey found that 72 percent of Serbian survey respondents believed that NATO provoked Russia to invade Ukraine.

The most direct evidence of what that working group actually does lies in the treatment of Russian anti-war activists who fled to Serbia after February 2022. In July 2023, the Security Information Agency detained Peter Nikitin — a Dutch-Russian lawyer who organizes anti-Putin rallies in Belgrade as spokesman for the Russian Democratic Society — for over 24 hours at Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport on a deportation order, then released him without explanation. This case became a pattern. Serbia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs denied residency permits to Vladimir Volokhonsky, Yevgeny Irzansky, and the literary translator Elena Koposova, each on grounds of an undisclosed “security risk” — the same vocabulary the Security Information Agency uses against domestic critics. In October 2024, after organizing a memorial rally for Aleksei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died from poisoning in a Russian prison in February 2024, authorities ordered Anton Bobryshev to leave the country. Nikitin told cable news channel N1 that it was “the implementation of a secret agreement between the Security Information Agency and [Russia’s Federal Security Service], which Vulin signed a few years ago to counter color revolutions.”

I personally witnessed the consequences of the repressions aimed at the Russian emigrant political activists in Serbia. Between August 2025 and July 2026, I conducted in-depth interviews with the members of this diaspora over two research trips. What I found was not the dramatic, attention-grabbing repression of poisonings and shootings, but something quieter and, for that reason, more effective and more dangerous, a condition I have come to call ambient repression. My interviewees could rarely tell whether a denied permanent residency permit, a police warning, a “national security threat” designation, unidentifiable men photographing a rally, anonymous threats, or even harassment from right-wing groups came directly from Serbian security services, or from the Russian state. While politically active Russian migrants have their residency permits annulled, certain groups of Russians do receive Serbian passports. The investigative outlet IStories documents that over two hundred Russians have been granted Serbian citizenship “in the interests of the republic” since January 2022, a priority list of sorts that consists of Kremlin-tied elites, pro-war billionaires, and figures under E.U. sanctions.

This type of unnoticeable repression is the operational doctrine of a captured state. It explains why the regime met the 2024 to 2025 student uprising, the largest civic mobilization in Serbia’s post-Milošević history, not with mass arrests but with calculated delegitimation, smears in regime tabloids, leaked recordings of organizers, the arrest of six activists for “plotting a violent overthrow of the constitutional order,” and Vučić’s televised threat that the special-forces unit could disperse the protesters in “six or seven seconds.” The students have refused political affiliation and opposition co-optation, denying the regime the partisan target it needs, making “the color revolution” framing the regime’s only remaining narrative.

Orbán’s Shield, Now Gone

For 16 years, Viktor Orbán did things for Aleksandar Vučić that no one else in Europe could: He voted against support for Ukraine and blocked E.U. sanctions against Russia, ensuring that Serbia’s refusal to join them carried no consequence. He advocated loudly for fast-tracking Serbia’s accession, allowing the regime to appear simultaneously rewarded by Europe and resistant to it. Orbán also anchored a Belgrade-Budapest-Moscow energy corridor, the TurkStream gas pipeline, the planned additions to the Druzhba pipeline, and numerous large-scale Chinese-financed infrastructure projects.

Péter Magyar’s victory disrupts all three functions at once and releases the European Union from the trap of authoritarian equilibrium, which has for years allowed autocrats to remain shielded and sustained by E.U. funding, with minimal internal resistance. Magyar has signaled an intention to “pivot away from Hungary’s dependence on Russian energy sources.” His Tisza party sits in the European People’s Party, the same family as the Croatian Democratic Union, whose prime minister Andrej Plenković was among the first to congratulate Magyar by phone. The European People’s Party’s balance of forces in the council has shifted overnight against Belgrade. And on accession, Magyar has neither the ideological affinity nor the political incentive to push Serbia’s bid past the rule-of-law objections that have been mounting since the disputed December 2023 elections and last year’s crackdowns.

Orbán’s fall breaks the authoritarian equilibrium that has benefitted Serbia for years, and the psychological blow is at least as important as the institutional one. Regimes of this kind survive, as scholars have long argued, by projecting invincibility and persuading the elites and citizens that defection is costly and futile, by maintaining strong economic cooperation ties with nearby authoritarian governments, and by offering support to other states within the “autocratic club” during crisis times. Magyar’s victory disturbed all of these and demonstrated that even those who rule for a long time do not end up ruling forever.

Within hours of Hungary’s elections, leaders of the Serbian opposition parties commented that this historical victory is a “political roadmap for Serbia,” and that “soon freedom will arrive is Serbia too,” as “Today Orbán has fallen, tomorrow Vučić will.” Serbian elites can see what defeat looks like up close: since April, Orbán’s Fidesz has been in free fall, Orbán has all but vanished from public life, and Magyar’s parliament has removed the president and the head of the Constitutional Court, and banned three-term deputies from ever standing again. For the Serbian regime, whose legitimating claim rests on inevitability and stability claims, the collapse of an even more entrenched neighbor is destabilizing in itself. The Hungarians turned out at a record rate; Tisza won not by mobilizing a new base but by peeling rural and small-town voters from Fidesz on the kitchen-table issues that the Novi Sad disaster has put at the center of Serbian politics. Whether Hungarian elections move mass opinion in Serbia, however, is yet to be seen.

What Vučić Has Left

For a decade, Vučić has been able to juggle his political affinities: getting photographed with Ursula von der Leyen one week, and Vladimir Putin the next, calling the same protests “democratic excess” abroad and “foreign subversion” at home, while counting on Orbán to soften every council conclusion. Without Orbán, every act of repression in Belgrade translates more directly into accession penalties, frozen funds, and pressure on visa-free travel — the levers that have remained the European Union’s most consequential tools in the region. The Belgrade-Budapest energy corridor, which made TurkStream worth defending and Druzhba worth planning, has lost its terminus.

Hungary will not block the next sanctions package and will not lobby for Serbia’s accession. Under unanimity rules, punishing Belgrade required all 27 capitals to agree, while protecting it required only one, and Orbán’s vote supplied that protective power reliably, so much and so often that the E.U. diplomats preemptively drafted “unambitious” statements just to avoid veto votes. While Magyar’s victory does not make Brussels bold, it changes the default layout of the power: Sanctions language is no longer softened before the vote, and a hesitant majority does not have Orbán to hide behind.

To be clear, Orbán’s fall did not create Vučić’s vulnerability. The student-led protests, economic grievances, and entrenched corruption predate Hungary’s elections. Western democratizing leverage works because of the available openings in the domestic regime, not despite it. For a decade, Orbán functioned as what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way would call a “black knight,” a patron who blunts that leverage, operating from inside the European Union itself. His defeat signals the creation of openings for democratization, not to be mistaken with a direct establisher of democracy.

In late June 2026, 11 weeks after Orbán conceded, Vučić stunned the country by announcing he would resign and call early presidential and parliamentary elections, a year before his mandate expired. The analysts read it as a tactical retreat by a president who cannot run again and intends to return as prime minister, a move not unheard of among authoritarian rulers these days. A fresh four-year mandate, secured before the unshielded E.U. leverage tightens and before the students consolidate into an electoral force, is the rational move of a regime that has just lost its insurance.

The student movement has demonstrated mobilizational capacity unmatched since 2000. Local elections in Kosjerić, Zaječar, Negotin, Mionica, and Sečanj in 2025 showed that student-endorsed lists could break Serbian Progressive Party dominance, even in rural strongholds. The conditions that produced Tisza’s victory — economic stagnation, kitchen-table inflation, blatant elite corruption made undeniable by a fatal infrastructural collapse — are all prevalent in Serbia. What is missing, however, as the Atlantic Council’s Bailey Galicia has observed of both Serbia and Georgia, is a unified opposition willing to subordinate internal differences to a single electoral strategy.

Looking into the Future

The captured Security Information Agency, the pliant Higher Court in Belgrade, the centralized prosecution, the Huawei “Safe Cities” biometric surveillance grid, the pro-government media monopoly, and the loyal cadre throughout the state apparatus that Predrag Petrović documents will not vanish with one electoral shock in Budapest. Russia, for its part, has just acquired a reason to invest more, not less. With Hungary gone, Serbia becomes the Kremlin’s most important remaining anchor in the region, and a patron that has spent a decade building an entire apparatus inside the country will not let it slip easily. The world should expect to see the public choreography intensify: more from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, more shadow war-style productions from television channel Russia Today Balkan, more hysterical pseudo-news about the “foreign enemies” from Radio Sputnik, and more of the authoritarian intelligence cooperation between the Security Information Agency and Russia’s Federal Security Service. Non-state authoritarianism will likely grow accordingly: The post-2022 ecology of pro-Russian fringe parties, veterans’ associations, far-right street formations, and quasi-governmental entities operating openly in Serbia, including the Russian World Foundation, the Gorchakov Fund, and the notorious Russian-Serbian Humanitarian Center in Niš, are all even more likely than before to receive additional state funding and become more ubiquitous in Serbia. As the Orbán-operated revolving door in Brussels closes, the value of every instrument Moscow still holds in Belgrade will only rise.

The European Union should treat Serbia’s elections as a test of the degree of authoritarian cooptation: deploy a full observation mission before the vote, scrutinize the ruling party’s use of state media and administrative resources, and make clear that the suspended 1.5 billion euros will not flow while protesters face prosecution for “plotting to overthrow the constitutional order.” Brussels should also watch what Belgrade does to the people least able to protest: Russian anti-war exiles expelled on vague and unjustified “security risk” grounds or stripped of residency. Member states should offer those activists humanitarian visas and a path to protection, and the European Commission should raise each expulsion by name in accession talks. A regime that has lost its main ally in Budapest will be watching closely to see whether anyone in Brussels is watching back.

Liudmila Listrovaya is a visiting assistant professor at Amherst College and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan’s Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia. Liudmila is a political and environmental sociologist specializing in Russian transnational repression and authoritarian populism. Her research on the Russian diaspora and on extraterritorial authoritarianism has recently appeared in Social Forces and other peer-reviewed journals, including Environmental Sociology, Society and Natural Resources, and Qualitative Sociology.

Image: European Union via Wikimedia Commons