Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik at the Kremlin in Moscow, 1 April 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE / MIKHAIL TERESHCHENKO / SPUTNIK /KREMLIN POOL
Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik, the controversial president of the Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity which makes up half of Bosnia and Herzegovina, on Tuesday, the Kremlin has announced.
Dodik, who is currently in his third term as president of the Republika Srpska, was sentenced to a year in prison in absentia by a court in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo in February and banned from serving in the position for six years.
Dodik was convicted of ignoring rulings made by the Bosnian Constitutional Court and Christian Schmidt, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose job is to oversee the implementation of the 1995 Dayton Agreement, which ended the Bosnian War.
Despite being nominally a part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republika Srpska is separately administered and there is no mechanism for Sarajevo to enforce court orders. In Dodik’s case, the court issued an international arrest warrant for him, which nevertheless failed to prevent Dodik travelling abroad.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has called the charges against Dodik, a key partner of Moscow in the Balkans, “fabricated”.
In November 2023, Dodik predicted that he would be the first president of an independent Serbian entity on Bosnian soil, threatening to secede from Bosnia and Herzegovina, the fragile federation that was created by the Dayton Agreement.
Russia’s close historical and cultural ties to both the Bosnian Serbs and Serbia proper have only grown stronger since NATO bombed Serbia in 1999 over the ongoing crisis in Kosovo, the contested independence of which Serbia and Russia both roundly reject.
