Brnabic Summons Dragovic Over NGO Funding List
Serbia's parliament speaker has scheduled a Tuesday meeting with Serbian Sovereignists leader Vuksa Dragovic, after central bank data showed NGOs received 1.3 billion euros from abroad.
National Assembly Speaker Ana Brnabic has invited Vuksa Dragovic, leader of the Serbian Sovereignists movement, to a meeting in her office, and he accepted the invitation the same day. The meeting is set for Tuesday, August 4, and its subject is the funding of nongovernmental organizations in Serbia. The invitation came three days after Dragovic published a response from the National Bank of Serbia showing that associations and foundations registered in Serbia received 1.3 billion euros from abroad between 2021 and 2025.
Dragovic announced that he had accepted on X: “I was invited to a meeting at the office of the speaker of the National Assembly, regarding nongovernmental organizations, on Tuesday. I accepted the invitation.”
Brnabic had announced the meeting a day earlier, appearing on TV Prva. She converted the five year total into a monthly average and built her entire objection on that figure. She claims the money did not go toward reforms but toward pressuring the state and, as she put it, above all toward President Aleksandar Vucic.
“That is between 21 and 22 million euros a month. Every single month. For what? What have they done for Serbia to deserve that much? How did they help reforms in Serbia?” Ana Brnabic asked.
The inflow, in her account, jumped after the last cluster was opened in Serbia’s negotiations with the European Union in 2021, when European integration, as she assessed it, stopped being about reforms and became a matter of obedience and demands to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation.
What the central bank actually said
The NBS response, which Dragovic published on July 30, breaks down foreign currency inflows to associations and foundations by year:
- 2021: 215 million euros
- 2022: 230 million euros
- 2023: 288 million euros
- 2024: 310 million euros
- 2025: 265 million euros
The inflow rose without interruption through 2024, the year the canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, when the amount peaked. In 2025 it posted its only decline in the series, dropping to 265 million, or 45 million euros less than the year before.
What is missing from that letter defines the limits of the whole story. Dragovic put three questions to the central bank and received an answer to only the first one. A list of the 50 associations and foundations that received the most money, along with a list of the ten leading countries the money came from, was not provided, with the bank citing legal restrictions. The 1.3 billion euro figure stands, but without a single recipient’s name attached to it.
So where does the list of 80 organizations come from?
That list is not part of the NBS document. Dragovic presented it himself, appearing on the show “Danas na RT Balkan,” where he spoke about roughly 80 foreign nongovernmental organizations operating in Serbia and unveiled a combined overview of those organizations and their funders. He described his motive as an effort to stop these groups, under the guise of human rights and democracy, from financing what he called a color revolution.
He also described a pattern he says these organizations follow on the ground:
“The pattern is the same every time. We gather to fight for or against something, and then they use their media to put forward the people they want. They do not let anyone from outside step in. When a protest is coming to an end, the people they picked take it over, even though most of them never actually took part in it. There is no one in the opposition media who is not tied to an NGO,” Dragovic said.
Unlike the NBS total, the claims about the list have not been confirmed by any official document made public so far.
What to expect after Tuesday
Neither Brnabic nor Dragovic has said what form the meeting will take, who else will be at the table, or whether any move in the Assembly itself will follow. Only the place, the day and the topic are known.
That makes the one measurable thing that could come out of the meeting exactly what the central bank declined to send: the names of recipients and the countries the money came from. If the same figure keeps circulating after Tuesday with no names attached, the meeting remains a political statement. If even part of the list surfaces, the story moves from interpretation into documentation, with all the consequences that carries for the organizations that turn up on it.
