Dodik, Minic Meet Putin in Moscow Days Before Bosnia's General Election

Bosnian Serb ruling politicians Milorad Dodik and Prime Minister Savo Minic met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Tuesday, just days before Bosnia's general election this weekend.

Bosnian Serb official television reported that the two received the Russian president's support for Sunday's vote. Dodik, a former Bosnian Serb president, is a staunchly pro-Russian figure who has travelled to Moscow ahead of previous elections as well.

Around 3.4 million voters in Bosnia will elect a multi-ethnic presidency, the central Parliament and the institutions of the country's two entities. That institutional structure was established under the peace agreement that ended Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

Dodik has been barred from holding public office in Bosnia but continues to lead the governing Alliance of Independent Social Democrats and has dominated the pre-election campaign in the Serb-held part of the country. A chief Russian ally in the Balkans, he has repeatedly clashed with Western officials overseeing peace in Bosnia and faced U.S. sanctions during the Biden administration.

His calls for the separation of the Serb entity from Bosnia have stirred Western fears of renewed instability in the Balkans while the war in Ukraine continues.

Decades after the conflict, Bosnia remains ethnically tense and economically weak. The country is formally seeking European Union membership, but progress has been slow.

Tensions before the October 4 election were revived by public tributes among Bosnian Serbs, and in Serbia, to wartime army commander Ratko Mladic, who died in late August while serving a life sentence for genocide and other war crimes. Bosnian Serbs regard Mladic as a hero despite his conviction by a U.N. court over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys and other atrocities. Key Bosnian Serb officials attended his funeral service in Belgrade, drawing sharp criticism from the EU.

Bosniaks, who are mainly Muslim, and Croats together form Bosnia's second entity, the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ethnic Serb entity and the Bosniak-Croat entity are bound together by joint central institutions.

The 1992 war began after Bosnia declared independence from the Serb-led former Yugoslavia, with ethnic Serbs taking up arms to carve out their own state and join Serbia. More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, which displaced millions.