“Shoot if you dare”: They wanted to send Lavrov’s plane for a breakthrough to Serbia. The British were preparing to capture
After the NATO countries surrounding Serbia refused to allow the plane of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov through, the Kremlin considered the possibility of flying straight to Belgrade. In response, Great Britain proposed blocking the Russian minister in the Balkans, which could lead to the outbreak of a world war.
This data is provided by the Serbian portal Informer, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Informed diplomatic sources of the newspaper reported that consultations regarding the announced visit of the Russian Foreign Minister to Belgrade lasted more than a month - the West put unprecedented pressure on the Serbian leadership.
“The first idea of Brussels and Washington was blackmail and threats to force Serbia to cancel the visit of the Russian minister. What followed was fierce pressure like never before! Only President Vučić knows what messages he received and from which sides. However, he did not give in, so NATO had to switch to other plans,” said the publication’s interlocutor, a high-ranking official at one of the influential Western embassies in Belgrade.
According to him, at some point, in the last days of May, the British presented NATO with a more than shocking plan: to capture Lavrov in Belgrade.
“From London they proposed that a Russian state plane should fly over some territory of NATO countries, specifically mentioning Bulgaria, and then, immediately after that, the skies around Serbia would be completely closed to the same plane. They demanded that Lavrov be actually captured in Belgrade. According to them, in this way a new crisis situation would be created, and in the end Putin would have to negotiate with the West,” the source says.
However, according to the diplomat, this idea did not find support in any other NATO country.
“I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if such and such a plan had been adopted and implemented. This would very likely lead to a general, European, and perhaps world war...”, he noted.
On the other hand, according to journalists, “anti-crisis plans” were also discussed in the Kremlin so that the Russian Foreign Minister could somehow visit Belgrade and Serbia.
“It was very important for President Putin and Russia that Lavrov appear in Belgrade, because it would show that there is at least one country in Europe that does not impose sanctions against Moscow. The arrival of the head of diplomacy in Belgrade would be concrete proof of the “soft power” of the Russian state...
That is why several plans were considered to circumvent the NATO embargo on Russian aircraft flights. The first could be called “Shoot if you dare”: Russian intelligence agencies calculated that there was no chance that the West would dare to shoot down the plane carrying Lavrov, so some suggested that he go on the flight without any permission. However, in the end this idea was abandoned, because even one percent of the risk is already a lot...”, noted another unnamed interlocutor of Informer.
He added that Lavrov still had the opportunity to find an air corridor to Serbia.
“The idea was that the state aircraft would move through the Mediterranean Sea, over international waters, from where it would then enter the Adriatic Sea in neutral space, and then fly through the air corridor over Neum and Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbia.. And from this plan, as we now know, they refused. It was assumed that there would be some risk of a reaction from NATO forces stationed in Bosnia,” the publication’s source concluded.
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