Thank you very much.
Honourable members, the overall security dynamics in the western Balkans are moving in the wrong direction and have been for more than a decade. This concerns Canada, because His Majesty's government has a vested interest in the stability of Europe and in demonstrating Canada's burden-sharing and energy capacities to its European allies.
The chief threats to regional security are a combination of factors that have remained largely unaltered since the 1990s—revanchist ambitions in Belgrade and Zagreb, which undermine the sovereignty and territorial integrity of vulnerable neighbouring democracies, and an overall international posture of indifference to western Balkan affairs.
In the 1990s, divergent views within the Atlantic community delayed action to prevent the first systematic crimes against humanity and genocide in Europe since the Holocaust, most infamously during the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Today it is not merely fractures within the democratic west that undermine the Euro-Atlantic agenda in the region; it is also the strident and expanding influence of China and Russia too.
During his recent visit to Beijing, Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vučić, whose government has engaged in large-scale election fraud and actively suppressed peaceful anti-government protests for nearly two years, received from Xi Jinping the Friendship Medal of the People's Republic of China, an award reserved for the CCP's closest allies. This comes after large-scale weapons transfers to Serbia from China, including sophisticated missile and drone systems, and as Chinese-manufactured facial recognition software has been deployed on the streets of the Serbian capital with successive tours of Chinese police patrols.
Serbia's acquisition of modern Chinese military equipment, along with similar systems from Russia, has not sat dormant either. In September 2023, a group of 80-plus Serbian paramilitaries with direct links to the most senior levels of the Belgrade government attempted to seize strategic sites in Kosovo's north with approximately five million euros' worth of heavy-caliber, Serbian-origin arms. The operation was clearly modelled on similar actions by Belgrade in Croatia and Bosnia during the 1990s. Local law enforcement intercepted them, and a day-long firefight erupted, which left one Kosovo police officer and three Serbian militants dead.
Simultaneously, Belgrade, along with the Kremlin, remains the chief international backer of the secessionist regime in Bosnia as a Republika Srpska entity. Milorad Dodik, the longtime nationalist strongman who presides over the R.S. regime despite having been formally removed from office by the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, threatens the territorial integrity of the Bosnian state and the Dayton Peace Agreement on a near daily basis. In May, he visited Moscow twice to meet with senior Russian officials to solicit support for this dangerous agenda.
Despite more than two decades of attacks on the single most significant diplomatic pillar of the post-Yugoslav era in the region, the Dayton Peace Agreement, the U.S. decided to lift virtually its entire sanctions regime against Mr. Dodik and his retinue in October 2025, with little coherent public justification. Regional observers, however, claimed that Dodik secured this major American policy shift, which has also apparently involved the U.S. effort to push out Christian Schmidt as Bosnia's high representative, by spending millions of dollars retaining the services of far right lobbyists and other hard right influencers in Washington.
Mr. Dodik also has important European friends. The former Orbán government was arguably his chief EU benefactor, explicitly blocking Brussels from imposing sanctions against him and his inner circle. Although Budapest is now expected to shift its Bosnia policy, there has been no movement on the EU sanctions file, largely because Dodik also enjoys the protection of Croatia.
Zagreb backs him because of his decades-long partnership with the HDZ BiH, the Bosnian-based Croat nationalist sister party of Croatia's governing HDZ, and because both he and the HDZ BiH are central to preventing the reform of Bosnia's constitution in line with the binding rulings of the European Court of Human Rights and the opinions of the Venice Commission. Thus, although Croatia claims to support Bosnia's entry into the EU and NATO, it opposes nearly every reform needed to realize those objectives.
In conclusion, as Canada looks to deepen its relations with the EU, the western Balkans are perhaps the most obvious region in Europe for Ottawa to demonstrate the meaning of what Prime Minister Carney has called “variable geometry”—the formation of ad hoc coalitions to defend peace and order and aid in the construction of good government.
While Kosovo and Bosnia may benefit most from a Canada that seeks to prove that pluralism works, its net benefits would be felt across the region, including in states like Serbia, which has struggled to throw off the yoke of despotism, and Montenegro, which hopes to overcome entrenched political skepticism at home and in several European capitals to become the 28th member of the EU before the decade's close.
Thank you. I invite your questions.