Serbia's Special Forces Drill at Perucac, Near Bosnia Border

Members of the 72nd Special Operations Brigade of the Serbian Army trained from September 15 to 18, 2026, on Lake Perucac on the Drina River, along a stretch that partly forms the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The exercise took place just a few hundred meters from the state border itself, and the nearest settlement on the Bosnian side is Klotjevac, a returnee village in the Srebrenica municipality that sits directly on the lake’s shore.

The Serbian Ministry of Defense said the drill was a regular part of summer training held every year.

“Training of the 72nd Special Operations Brigade’s units in summer conditions is carried out every year, in lowland and mountainous terrain, under conditions as close to real ones as possible. Its execution improves the individual training and preparedness of the units to carry out their designated tasks,” the ministry said.

According to what the ministry released, soldiers practiced maneuvers on steep slopes and rock faces as well as on the water: crossing water obstacles, swimming with combat gear, moving through difficult mountain terrain, using climbing equipment, and operating assault boats with drone support. None of the available sources indicate that live ammunition was used during this particular exercise.

The exercise was visited by General Milan Mojsilovic, Chief of the General Staff of the Serbian Army, and General Matthew Woodruff, commander of the Ohio National Guard. Woodruff was in Serbia on an official visit at the time, marking 20 years of partnership between Serbia and the Ohio National Guard, a program Belgrade regularly points to as one of its more stable military cooperation channels with Washington.

Residents of returnee villages in the Podrinje area spent days anxiously following the gunfire and the movement of military boats near the lake, which left them unsettled. According to reporting by N1 BiH, some returnees temporarily suspended their daily routines, though that reaction was not a direct consequence of the exercise itself. It stemmed instead from a broader mood in the region following recent rallies in support of Ratko Mladic in Republika Srpska, which had already left some returnees feeling unsafe.

An unconfirmed report also surfaced claiming that Serbian Army personnel crossed the state border into Bosnia and Herzegovina during the activities on the lake. There has been no official confirmation of that claim, and neither the Bosnian Ministry of Defense nor the Bosnian Border Police had issued a statement on the matter by the time of publication. Institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina have also not said whether they were informed in advance of maneuvers in the border zone, even though standard diplomatic practice calls for a high-level military exercise near a sensitive border to be announced to the neighboring country through regular diplomatic channels.

The Perucac exercise came just days after “Pobednik 2026” (Victor 2026) on Pester, the largest Serbian Army activity of the year, which involved more than 2,000 soldiers and over 500 pieces of weaponry and equipment. Two exercises in quick succession, one inland and the other right on the border with Bosnia, suggest that this autumn’s training season is more intense than usual for the Serbian Army, and that part of this year’s training has, for the first time in this sequence, brought military activity right up to the demarcation line with a neighboring state.