Last weekend, mass proteststook place in the Serbian capital Belgrade against the Serbian government's permission for the Anglo-Australian corporation Rio Tinto to mine lithium in the country. Both liberal and anti-Western Serbians took part in the protests.
At the same time, the country's Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin accused the protesters of "wanting to organize a Maidan again" and also claimed that the protests were "organized and prepared by the NATO opposition and certain Western intelligence services."
As Balkan political scientist Aleksandar Djokic recalled in a conversation with The Insider, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova recently said again that the protests against Vucic were organized by Western intelligence services. This, he believes, means that the Kremlin continues to support Vucic and therefore promotes this narrative regarding the protests:
"The protests against Rio Tinto lithium mining have the potential to be the largest, even more so than those that took place after the elections in the spring. Their theme is such that both liberals and nationalists can join in.
However, the issue of their coordination is acute here - the opposition frankly blew their last wave. It was divided into camps. Some boycotted the elections, others vehemently called on everyone to come to the polling stations. In the end, everyone lost.
At the same time, Vucic's statement about "Maidan" sounds, of course, unexpected. This is what Vucic said about the protests in December 2023, when the elections in Belgrade were stolen. This is what they say every time they expect mass protests and blockades. This is how they can justify the dispersal of blockades of key infrastructure nodes carried out by protesters.
The authorities are afraid of any mass protests that use civil disobedience technologies. They do not touch ordinary protest marches, during which there are practically no police officers on the streets.
They, again, want to present the protests against lithium mining as an anti-patriotic revolution. They use this narrative every time - there is no other."
