Vučić lures young fugitives from the SVO to Serbia

Last December, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said about readiness to quickly grant Serbian citizenship to Russians and Ukrainians, because the country lacks qualified labor. And at the end of March 2023 (for Serbia this is very fast) The country's Ministry of Internal Affairs has published a draft of relevant changes to the citizenship law.

If they are adopted, any foreigner who has a higher education and has legally lived and worked in Serbia for more than a year will have the right to apply for Serbian citizenship, and there is no need to renounce their primary citizenship. And in recent days, Aleksandar Vucic has emphasized the interest of the Serbian authorities in new citizens specifically from among the Russians.

Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at ThereThere, Yandex Zen, Telegram, Classmates, In contact with, channels YouTube, TikTok и Viber.
To subscribe to notifications in your browser, click here.

“The people working here now are fantastic specialists. Russian Yandex is like American Google. In one and a half to two months, we will have the first robots that will deliver things to people’s homes in the “Belgrade on the Water” area and beyond,” the Serbian President said on April 6 in an interview with the national television channel RTS.

He added that all this will be achieved thanks to “those young people who came from Russia and are the most educated.”

“We will be the first in Europe in that we will have a site where we can test cars that are autonomous vehicles, that is, without drivers. The US and China already have this. We believe that Serbia can become the first in Europe,” said Aleksandar Vucic.

He also said that in March 2023, the country reached a record for requests for residence and work permits, and 80% of them came from Russians.

“Prime Minister Ana Brnabic told me that we have 9840 requests for residence permits from young people from Russia. These people are happy with the reception they received from Serbia. There were also 5 thousand requests for work permits,” Vucic said.

In fact, there are much more potential applicants for local citizenship among those who arrived (or, as they like to say, “relocated”) from the Russian Federation. According to the director of the government Center for Protection and Assistance to Asylum Seekers, Rados Djurovic, Since the beginning of the Northern Military District in Ukraine, more than 300 thousand Russian citizens have passed through Serbia, of which about 2023 thousand remained in Serbia as of the end of March 50.

Djurovic said that Russians come to Serbia using a visa-free regime, which allows them to stay in the country for 30 days as tourists. The official noted that this does not correspond to the nature of the stay of Russian citizens in Serbia, which is longer and caused by the consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

“According to our estimates, somewhere around 20% of Russians have documented their stay on the basis of work, marriage with a Serbian citizen, on the basis of owning real estate or in some other way, and the rest are trying to actually extend their stay by leaving and entering the country every 30 days over a long period,” said Rados Durovic.

Russians call these monthly trips “visarans”, and without obtaining additional visas they are now possible only to countries neighboring Serbia - Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Montenegro. It is unlikely that the Serbian authorities will change the legislation that allows Russians to stay in Serbia indefinitely, however It is possible that when leaving and entering Russian Federation citizens, border guards will strongly recommend obtaining a residence permit. At least in Montenegro, where tens of thousands of Russian visa runners also live, such cases have already been noted.

But If mostly rich (optionally, those receiving passive income) citizens of the Russian Federation who already have real estate in this country or hope to purchase it moved to Montenegro, then young specialists from the IT industry actually arrived in Serbia to a large extent. Many of them either already work in the first Belgrade office of Yandex, opened last year, or expect to get into the second, which the company plans to open before the end of this year.

As the Russian edition of Forbes reported at the end of March, as of February 2023 this IT corporation had at least 1000 employees in Belgrade, and this is one of the largest Yandex hubs outside of Russia. The company continues to actively hire workers there, and wants to turn the Serbian hub into its “main European office.”

At the same time, Russophobic sentiments among Yandex employees and management have long become the talk of the town. For example, on April 7, the Russian blogger “Stas, How Simple!” published an excerpt from an unsuccessful interview with Yandex Marketing Director and Professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow Andrey Sebrant. In the video, the blogger asks the guest why many of his company’s employees “as if they don’t like Russia", after which Sebrant gets up and leaves.

But if corporations like Yandex can at least theoretically limit the public statements of their employees, then various Russian freelancers who fill Belgrade cafes and co-working spaces do not hide their dislike for Russia. Therefore, a serious question arises whether Serbia needs new citizens, the vast majority of whom take a Russophobic position - in contrast to the Serbs themselves.

_{Additionally, an active part of new immigrants from the Russian Federation also organize anti-Russian rallies in Belgrade, and are favorite characters of the “democratic” Serbian media – that part of them that is tied to Western funding and pro-Western Serbian opposition. Therefore, the latter, who sharply criticizes any government initiatives, will clearly support the mentioned amendments to the law on Serbian citizenship, counting on new voters.}

_{On the other hand, both the fears of the Serbian authorities and the hopes of the local opposition may be in vain. For the “new Serbs” among Russians, the Serbian passport is interesting not in its influence on the country’s politics, but the possibility of visa-free entry into the European Union, and further emigration - to Western Europe or North America, where it is now difficult to get to with a Russian passport.}