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In 2022, Dimitar Bechev wrote “War Won’t be Coming Back to the Balkans” for War on the Rocks, in which he argues that, “while Russia has an incentive to open a second front against the West, its partners and fellow travelers in the Balkans have much to lose from an escalation.” If Europe applied pressure and worked with partners in the Balkans, he argued, Russia would struggle to spark conflict in the region. Two years on, we asked him to look back on his article and argument. Read more below. Photo credit: Sgt. Stanford Toran, U.S. Army In your article, you argue that, “while Russia has an incentive to open a second front against the West [in the Balkans], its partners and fellow travelers in the Balkans have much to lose from an escalation.” How has the situation changed in the two years since? The situation has remained largely the same. There are some interesting nuances, of course. First, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic raised the stakes lately by denouncing opposition protests in the wake of last December’s snap parliamentary and local elections, marred by irregularities, as an attempted “color revolution.” The government thanked Russian security services for tipping them off. However, there is a reason to believe that Serbia has been double-dealing, sending ammunition to Ukraine via Turkey to curry favor with the United States. Elsewhere in the region, Montenegro finally got a new government that is backed by both pro-Western and pro-Serbian parties, with the latter formerly backed by the Kremlin, too. Now, it appears that they support NATO membership and the country’s future accession to the European Union. The headline, to my mind, is that local political dynamics matter more than tectonic geopolitical forces, in the final analysis. What happened in the Serbian elections in 2022? How has the government’s