This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
Serbia is halting all ammunition exports following a decision by President Aleksandar Vucic as the Balkan country faces challenges over exports to Israel and Moscow’s suspicions that ammunition made in Serbia has made its way to Ukraine.
“We’ve halted literally everything, and we are supplying our army,” Vucic said on June 23 after reporters asked whether Serbia had chosen a side in the Israeli-Iranian conflict by exporting ammunition to Israel.
Vucic told reporters after attending a meeting with the Armed Forces Chief of General Staff that Serbia’s arms exports to Israel following the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas was “one thing,” and that today “we have a different situation.”
Several hours after Vucic’s comments, the Serbian Ministry of Defense said that any future exports of arms manufactured in Serbia would require the consent of the country’s National Security Council and permission from other relevant authorities.
Serbia also has faced pressure from Moscow, which recently criticized Serbia’s position on arms exports. Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) accused Serbia of exporting arms to Ukraine via third countries.
“Ammunition produced at Serbian defense enterprises, primarily for heavy long-range systems, is sent to NATO countries in the interests of Ukraine in the form of complete sets of parts for assembly,” the SVR claimed in a statement on June 23.
“This allows Kyiv to formally receive military products that are no longer Serbian but assembled at weapons factories in Western countries.”
Serbia’s Ministry of Defense didn’t respond to RFE/RL’s requests to confirm or deny the SVR’s allegations, which have not been addressed by Vucic or other Serbian officials.
According to the SVR, Serbia’s ammunition exports to Ukraine have strained ties between Belgrade and Moscow.
“It is regrettable that now these traditions of friendship and mutual assistance are crossed out by the thirst for profit and cowardly multi-vectorism,” the SVR said in the statement.
It claimed that the assembly and loading of ammunition produced in Serbia “is carried out primarily in the Czech Republic and Bulgaria.”
Neither the Czech nor the Bulgarian foreign ministry was available to comment on the Russian allegations following inquiries by RFE/RL.
The Bulgarian military company EMCO Ltd., designated by the Russian SVR as one of the companies to which Serbia delivers ammunition for further shipment to Ukraine, strongly denied these allegations in comments to RFE/RL, calling them “unfounded.”
“We declare that this is not true. EMCO has not exported any material for the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine for about 10 years,” the company said.
For more than three years, Vucic has endured pressure from both Brussels and Washington to impose sanctions on Russia after its unprecedented full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
In May he made his first visit to Moscow since its invasion of Ukraine and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising concern in Brussels.
The European Commission on May 8 advised Vucic to “refrain from giving legitimacy to Putin’s aggression against Ukraine.”
Vucic earlier this month received praise for Serbia’s support from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Odesa, where the two met on the margins of the Ukraine-South East Europe Summit.
Serbia’s official stance is that it “fully respects” Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. However, it has not joined Western sanctions against Moscow despite being a candidate country for the EU membership.
Media reports on Serbia’s ammunition exports to Ukraine, which Vucic and other top Serbian officials have denied, have been mounting over the years.
In June 2024, the Financial Times reported that Serbia’s ammunition exports arriving in Ukraine via third parties totaled around 800 million euros since 2022.
Commenting on these estimates at the time, Vucic said that export was “a part of [Serbia’s] economic revival and important for us.”
“Yes, we do export our ammunition,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times. “We cannot export to Ukraine or to Russia … but we have had many contracts with Americans, Spaniards, Czechs, others. What they do with that in the end is their job.”
Precise data on what weapons and military equipment and in what quantities Serbia exports to Ukraine, Israel, and other countries is not publicly available, as in recent years the relevant ministry has not published annual reports on issued export permits on its website.
