The Trump administration has lifted sanctions on a kleptocratic ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was removed this month as president of the Serb territory within Bosnia and Herzegovina for chipping away at the US-brokered peace deal that ended bloody ethnic violence in the Balkans in the 1990s.
The waiving of sanctions on Milorad Dodik followed a months-long lobbying effort by allies of Donald Trump, which painted the Serb nationalist leader as a defender of “Christian values” in a country with a large Muslim population, and a victim of the sort of “lawfare” waged against the US president.
Dodik had been sanctioned by the US for flouting the Dayton Peace Agreement, which was painstakingly thrashed out in Ohio in 1995 to end the Bosnian War. While the agreement stopped the bloodshed, it carved Bosnia into two entities: the Federation, where Bosnian Muslims share power with Croats, and the Serb-majority Republika Srpska.
Over 20 years in and around power in Srpska, Dodik routinely threatened to split from Bosnia and “reunite” with Serbia. He has halted Bosnia’s integration into Europe by stoking ethnic tensions, often meets with Putin in Russia and has cultivated what the US Treasury Department previously called a “corrupt patronage network.”
Bosnians had recently begun to imagine a post-Dodik future, after the longtime leader was convicted by a federal Bosnian court of undermining the Dayton agreement, banned from holding political office and stripped of his post as president. But experts say that the sudden and unexpected removal of sanctions against Dodik could allow him to continue to dominate Srpska, while demonstrating to other autocrats in the region that well-funded lobbying can reap rewards from Trump’s Washington.
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