Vučić’s Defeat Is Not Yet a Victory for Serbia’s European Future

Aleksandar Vučić has lost the election, and Ukraine now has good reason to take a close look at who has won. For Serbia’s citizens, worn down by 14 years of rule under the former president’s Serbian Progressive Party, the Student List’s victory offers grounds for hope that they will finally be able to hold those who govern them to account.

For Ukrainians defending their country against Russian aggression every day, it also matters what the winners intend to do with the relationship Belgrade has built with Kyiv.

With 98.8 percent of votes counted, the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID), an independent Serbian election-monitoring organization, and Ipsos, the international polling company, project that the Student List will take around 140 of parliament’s 250 seats, enough to form a government on its own.

In a country where party membership has for years opened the doors of state institutions, that result matters enormously. The deaths of 16 people when the canopy of Novi Sad railway station collapsed turned a demand for accountability into a revolt against the way the country was governed. Citizens have every right to expect courts free from political pressure and close public scrutiny of how the state spends their money.

The scale of that change makes it all the more important to read carefully what the winners say about the world. The Student List brings together professors, doctors and other public figures chosen by students to represent them, yet there are no students among its candidates. Some very old political convictions sit alongside its youthful symbolism, particularly regarding Russia, Kosovo and Europe. That gives Moscow an opening to preserve its influence after the defeat of the man it has dealt with for so many years.

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In these pages in August, I strongly supported Vučić’s decision to receive Volodymyr Zelensky in Belgrade. I stand by that position after his electoral defeat. Ties with a country defending itself against aggression retain their value after the politicians who built them leave office. Were we to undo every sound decision a government had made simply because its author had lost an election, Serbia’s foreign policy interests would endure no longer than an election campaign.

Vučić and Zelensky established regular contact and a working relationship that allowed them to discuss practical cooperation despite the deep differences between Belgrade and Kyiv over Moscow. After Vučić’s visits to Odesa in 2025 and Kyiv in July this year, Zelensky was officially welcomed in Belgrade on August 8. Their talks covered energy, railways, trade and Ukraine’s reconstruction. Each endorsed the other country’s European aspirations, and Serbia reaffirmed its respect for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Those talks have been accompanied by concrete aid. By February 2024, Serbia had allocated €3 million for Ukrainian children and €1.5 million for internally displaced people, sent 14 trucks carrying humanitarian aid and donated ambulances. It also sent equipment to help restore the electricity grid. In August this year, the Ukrainian presidency confirmed a further €2 million for the energy sector. For a country whose power stations and grid are under systematic Russian attack, such support has an immediate practical value.

There is also a military dimension, which Belgrade has spent years describing in guarded diplomatic language. As far back as June 2024, the Financial Times reported an estimate that around €800 million worth of Serbian ammunition had reached Ukraine through intermediaries since the invasion began. These were commercial exports via third countries. This year, Christopher Hill, the former US ambassador to Belgrade, described American support for the purchase of that ammunition and said those involved in Belgrade knew who the end user was.

Vučić’s policy towards Russia provided ample grounds for serious criticism, from his refusal to impose sanctions to his attendance at Putin’s parade in Moscow. His visit to Odesa ended with his refusal to sign a joint declaration calling for increased pressure on Russia. Even so, Ukrainian diplomacy managed to secure tangible benefits from that contradictory relationship. Zelensky had a duty to seek help wherever he could obtain it, including in Belgrade.

Parts of the Serbian opposition judged his visit chiefly by how much it might benefit Vučić. Srđan Milivojević, leader of the Democratic Party, which backed the Student List, argued that Vučić was using Zelensky to signal his usefulness to Berlin, expecting it in return to accept whatever election result he declared. This reduced the visit of a president whose country was under attack to a weapon in a domestic political feud, leaving Ukraine’s interests almost entirely out of the picture.

Milivojević is fully entitled to doubt Vučić’s motives. But I also expect a politician who presents his party as pro-European to recognize Ukraine’s needs. Zelensky is answerable to people who need ammunition, medicines and electricity, and every meeting that can secure such support is justified by his country’s needs. To demand that he tailor his diplomatic contacts to the mood of the Serbian opposition would reveal how little we understand the responsibilities of a president whose country is at war.

A protest letter signed by a hundred intellectuals in response to the visit displayed even more open hostility. Its signatories declared Zelensky chiefly responsible for the war, denied that Russia was the aggressor and warned that his visit threatened Serbia’s relations with Russia. That position effectively grants Moscow the right to decide whom Belgrade may receive. Appeals to Serbian dignity end, on this reasoning, in acceptance of Russian tutelage over Serbian diplomacy.

By that logic, the Ukrainian president should be held responsible both for the war Putin started and for the discomfort his visit causes Putin’s admirers. Ukrainians are expected to understand Serbia’s historical traumas, Russia’s security demands and other people’s electoral needs, while their own right to survive is subjected to endless political qualifications. It is hard to imagine greater moral arrogance than demanding that a people under bombardment spare the feelings of those who justify bombing them.

The Student List’s representatives must now show what approach to Ukraine they intend to turn into state policy. Their campaign statement of September 30 explicitly pledged that Serbia would continue to reject sanctions against Russia. University professor Radomir Saičić, a member of the Serbian Academy and one of the Student List’s most prominent figures, advocated “productive relations with Russia” during the campaign, invoking historical ties and energy needs. For Kyiv, those positions matter more than photographs of celebrations on Belgrade’s streets.

Historical ties deserve respect, and energy dependence demands serious efforts to reduce it. When used as permanent excuses for giving in to Moscow, they become instruments through which Russia maintains its advantage. The new government needs to explain what Serbia gains by making its European future dependent on the Kremlin’s mood, and how far it is prepared to limit cooperation with Ukraine for the sake of that relationship.

Invoking Kosovo makes that choice particularly difficult to defend. Ukraine has not recognized its independence, maintaining a position Belgrade regards as essential to its national interests. Russia, meanwhile, occupies Ukrainian territory and seeks to redraw borders by military force. Politicians who demand that the world respect Serbia’s territorial integrity have an added obligation to uphold the same principle for Ukraine, including Crimea and the other occupied regions.

The question for the winners is how much of the sovereignty they demand for Serbia they are prepared to recognize for Ukraine. The right to choose a government and determine a country’s future is the very basis of their electoral victory. Ukrainians are defending precisely that right against a state that denies their country’s existence. It would be a bitter outcome if politicians brought to office by citizens who had freed themselves from fear showed more sympathy for Putin’s demands than for the people he is subjecting to violence.

There is also a very practical question: who in the new majority will decide the course of those relations? Will ministers have the political backing to continue cooperating with Kyiv when the nationalist wing of their alliance objects? Will decisions on exports, humanitarian aid and diplomatic contacts serve Serbia’s interests, or the need to keep the peace among people who, until yesterday, were united by their opposition to Vučić?

The Kremlin can exploit precisely these divisions. All it needs to do is raise the political cost of every decision that helps Ukraine, present it as a betrayal of friendship with Russia and provoke disputes within the new government. Delaying contracts, halting deliveries or withdrawing from joint projects could then be presented as temporary concessions made to preserve unity. Ukrainians and Serbian citizens alike would bear the consequences, while Moscow secured the outcome it wanted.

For the pro-European members of the winning alliance, this is where they must face the responsibilities they could avoid during the campaign. They will have to state what cooperation with Ukraine they support and which decisions they regard as unacceptable. Invoking the movement’s diversity will quickly lose its force once they are voting on budgets, appointing ministers and making commitments to other countries. Every concession to Russian interests will then carry their names and be backed by their votes.

I expect Moscow to use Serbia’s relations with Ukraine to test how much influence it can exert over the new government in Belgrade. Serbia now has an opportunity to make a democratic change of government the basis for greater independence in its foreign policy, and its new representatives have a strong enough mandate to take responsibility for that choice.

Ukrainians deserve to see that independence exercised in Serbia’s dealings with them as well. Their president must be welcome in Belgrade even when his visit displeases Moscow and offers no electoral advantage to his Serbian hosts. If, after a victory won on the promise of a freer Serbia, the Ukrainian president finds his scope for cooperation with the country curtailed, Vladimir Putin will have won a share of that victory. Responsibility for that outcome will lie with those who promised their citizens a free country, then allowed a foreign regime waging a war of aggression to set the limits of its foreign policy.