Milorad Dodik: Good With Putin, Backs Israel in US Podcast
Milorad Dodik told a podcast hosted by a Trump ally that he isn't 'Putin's man,' criticized Brussels, and said he backs Israel, citing shared Serb and Jewish suffering at Jasenovac.
President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik laid out a series of positions on relations with Russia, the European Union and Israel in an American podcast interview that speaks directly to Belgrade as well: the same dilemma of how to maintain ties with Washington, Moscow and Brussels at the same time has weighed on Serbian foreign policy for years.
Dodik appeared on the “War Zone” podcast hosted by Wayne Allyn Root, an American host whom domestic media describe as an associate of US President Donald Trump. During the conversation, he first denied being, as he put it Brussels describes him, “Putin’s man.”
It’s not in dispute that I have excellent relations with Putin, but I am not “Putin’s man,” as they claim in Brussels.
Why does Dodik defend his relationship with Putin?
As an example of what he called paranoia in Brussels, Dodik described an episode during a visit to a European capital when the failure of the street lighting was explained to him as somehow connected to the Russian president.
They have this paranoia. I was in Brussels and there was no street lighting, and they said it was because of President Putin. I asked what that has to do with Putin.
He said he is trying to maintain good relations with the United States, Russia and Brussels at the same time, but that this is becoming increasingly difficult given what he described as the current state of the European Union.
It’s evident that Europe has no leaders, no resources, and the values it was founded on have disappeared.
What does Dodik say about Israel and Jasenovac?
Part of the conversation was devoted to his stance toward Israel. Dodik said he supports the country and believes one should not stay silent when it is attacked, describing his relationship with Israel as a “relationship of growing up,” and pointing to the shared suffering of Serbs and Jews during World War Two, specifically at the Jasenovac concentration camp.
My family supported Jewish families who lived here at the time, so it has always been in my genes.
He also explained how he arrived at this view during his own education.
But I graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences. I started studying and reading, and I realized how much Jews were persecuted, not only by Nazi Germany, but also in Croatia when the Nazis were in power for four years.
He added that he had always regretted that the authorities in Josip Broz Tito’s communist Yugoslavia did not allow Serbs to have a better relationship with Israel. He also pointed to a part of history that, in his words, is rarely discussed: the suffering of Jews in Sarajevo during the period when Muslims held power in the city.
For Belgrade, this kind of positioning matters for the same reason it matters for Banja Luka. Every statement by a regional leader that simultaneously defends closeness with Moscow while seeking understanding in Washington and Brussels fits into the same balancing act that underpins Serbia’s own foreign policy, one in which the European perspective is not abandoned, but a sanctions regime against Russia is not introduced either. Whether Brussels will officially respond to Dodik’s remarks is not yet known.
