Dodik to Berlin: PIC Can't Choose High Representative
German Ambassador Alfred Granas says the High Representative in Bosnia can only be appointed by PIC consensus. Milorad Dodik and Russia's embassy say the body has no such power.
The dispute over who actually has the authority to appoint the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina entered a new round on August 6, and it concerns Belgrade more directly than it might first appear: how Annex 10 of the Dayton Agreement is read will decide who gets to impose laws in Republika Srpska and remove its officials in the years ahead. German Ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina Alfred Granas said the High Representative can only be appointed by consensus within the Steering Board of the Peace Implementation Council, a body better known by its acronym, PIC. SNSD leader Milorad Dodik responded the same day in a post on X, in sharper terms than usual even for this exchange.
“German Ambassador Alfred Granas either cannot read or is knowingly lying. PIC is a made up body, it has no influence whatsoever on the selection, appointment or confirmation of the High Representative. He is chosen by the signatory parties to the Dayton Agreement and confirmed by the UN Security Council, that is what Annex 10 of the Dayton Agreement says.”
He closed the message with a question addressed directly to the ambassador, “What is so hard to understand about that, Mr. Ambassador?”, and a remark on what is, and is not, the job of foreign diplomats in Sarajevo: “You came to Sarajevo to represent Germany, not to run Bosnia and Herzegovina. Stick to that and stop misleading and lying to the public.”
Why is the PIC dispute more than a legal argument?
Two readings of the same text collide. Berlin’s version treats agreement among all the ambassadors on the Steering Board as a precondition without which no appointment can go through. The Banja Luka version holds that the only relevant actors are the signatories to the peace agreement and the UN Security Council, and that everything else is a practice that hardened into a rule over time.
The difference is not academic. The High Representative holds the Bonn powers, meaning the right to impose laws and remove elected officials. Whoever controls the appointment controls that instrument. Bosnia and Herzegovina has been without a permanent High Representative since late June.
Moscow brings up 2021
Russia’s embassy in Bosnia and Herzegovina responded the same day, asking why the same standard was not applied five years earlier, when there was no consensus in the PIC Steering Board over the appointment of Christian Schmidt.
“Probably because Berlin considers its own position the only correct one, while Moscow’s position can be ignored,” the Russian embassy said.
The same statement also challenged Granas’s remarks about the Southern Interconnector gas pipeline. The Russian side argues that the German ambassador is simultaneously announcing Bosnia’s release from Russian gas and admitting that the project raises questions about compliance with European Union rules. The statement then turned to purchases of liquefied gas.
“While wanting to cut off Bosnia and Herzegovina’s supply of Russian gas, Germany, like many European countries, keeps buying Russian LNG at the same time, frantically topping up empty reserves,” the statement reads.
The response closed with the assessment that this amounts to “hypocrisy on full display.” According to the embassy, those purchases do not show up in the statistics because they go through intermediaries.
The deadline that passed on July 14
The timeline explains why this dispute is playing out right now. Schmidt submitted his resignation on May 10, 2026, after five years in office, and left the post at the end of June. The PIC Steering Board met in early June and failed to agree on a successor, so American diplomat Luis Krisok, previously Schmidt’s deputy, took over as acting head on July 1. At the time, that was presented as a temporary fix with a deadline of July 14 at the latest, by which a High Representative with a full mandate was expected to be appointed.
That deadline passed almost a month ago. Sarajevo is still without a permanent High Representative in August, and the shortlist has not changed: Italian diplomat Antonio Zanardi Landi, backed by the United States, and French special envoy for the Western Balkans Rene Trokaz, backed by Paris, London and Berlin. Granas’s statement about consensus comes from the capital standing behind the second option, and that is exactly how it was read in Banja Luka.
For Republika Srpska, this is not a new front but a continuation of a policy already spelled out. In mid July, after a meeting between SNSD and HDZ BiH delegations in Mostar, Dodik and Dragan Covic demanded that all decisions made by High Representatives be declared void, and that the acting head be given a clear deadline and an exit strategy. Challenging how the appointment itself is made is a logical next step in the same sequence.
The practical consequence is simple. Every decision Krisok signs in Sarajevo now comes with a question Banja Luka raises in advance: on what basis. And that question will not be answered by any ambassador, but first by the next meeting of the PIC Steering Board, and then by the UN Security Council.
