Brnabic: Serbia's Trade with China Under 8.5 Billion Euros

Ana Brnabic, Speaker of the National Assembly and former Prime Minister, published an opinion piece in the British Telegraph on September 18. The article was a response to an earlier piece in the same paper that, according to Brnabic, portrayed Serbia as a country balancing between Brussels, Washington, Moscow and Beijing.

Brnabic opened her piece with a question she described as the core assumption behind the Telegraph’s original article.

“Does a small European country that refuses to let others dictate who it can trade or talk with automatically have to be secretly involved in some kind of backroom political games?”

The answer she offered is that Serbia, as she put it, “simply exercises its sovereign right to make its own decisions.”

Trade with China under 8.5 billion euros

The central part of the piece compares Britain’s and Serbia’s trade with China. According to the figures Brnabic cites, Britain’s annual trade with China is worth more than 100 billion pounds, while Serbia’s trade with China comes in under 8.5 billion euros. She argued that London’s trade with Beijing is treated as ordinary economic cooperation, while Serbia’s trade with the same country is presented as evidence of Chinese influence in the region.

Brnabic adds that the European Union is Serbia’s largest trading partner and that Belgrade continues its EU membership process, but that this does not mean cutting economic ties with China, strengthening relations with the United States, or maintaining diplomatic relations with Russia.

“Serbia is, above all, a sovereign state that will always put the interests of its citizens first,” the Speaker of the National Assembly wrote.

Growth figures, from 2012 to 2025

A separate section of the piece is devoted to the past decade’s economic indicators. Citing the European Commission, Brnabic writes that gross domestic product per capita, measured in purchasing power standard, rose from 10,712 euros in 2012 to an estimated 20,365 euros in 2025. By that measure, Serbia has gone from 41.2 percent of the EU average to 51.3 percent.

For 2025, Brnabic states that average wages rose 7.1 percent in real terms, unemployment stood at 8.7 percent, and exports grew 8.4 percent. In the piece, these figures serve as a response to the Telegraph’s original portrayal of Serbia, which, in Brnabic’s view, overlooks the country’s economic transformation since Aleksandar Vucic came to power.

Zelensky’s visit as a counterargument

Responding to the part of the original article that painted Serbia as close to Moscow, Brnabic points to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s first official visit to Serbia, during which Vucic reaffirmed support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Her piece for the Telegraph ran the same day Vucic met Zelensky on the sidelines of the Carpathian Initiative summit in Ukraine.

Addressing criticism that Brussels lacks sufficient political leverage over Belgrade, Brnabic returns to a question she poses more than once in the piece.

“Why should economic interdependence mean political obedience?” the Speaker of the National Assembly asks, adding that strategic autonomy matters especially for small and medium sized states in an increasingly divided international environment.

Brnabic also addresses domestic politics in the piece, writing that Serbia has political problems like any other country and that citizens have protested and criticized the government, which she describes as part of the democratic process that institutions must respond to.

Closing the piece

Brnabic closes her Telegraph piece with a message aimed at the British public.

“Serbia is nobody’s pawn. It is a self confident, stable and prosperous European democracy,” she wrote in the closing section, adding that Serbia remains committed to joining the European Union as a sovereign state.

As of this article’s publication, the Telegraph’s editorial staff had not issued a separate response or additional comment on Ana Brnabic’s piece.