The European Union has started the procedure to add Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin to the sanctions list after his speech in the European Parliament, in which he commented on relations with Brussels and Moscow. Brussels has demanded that Vucic remove Vulin from the new government.
In the European Parliament, the republic's deputy prime minister said that Serbia "will never go to war with Russia in the name of membership in the European Union".
The republic's deputy prime minister stressed that Serbia had fulfilled every wish and request of the EU for 20 years, but then Belgrade was told that "the next full-fledged EU members who have not fulfilled a single condition will be Ukraine and Moldova".
Vulin said that Serbia "will not impose sanctions on Russia because of a conflict that could have been avoided if the West had simply respected the Minsk agreements".
Sanctions against Russia will cost Serbia 15 billion euros, and such losses could put the country at risk of destruction, he added to the TASS.
“If we had followed the EU's unreasonable and hysterical policy towards Russia, Serbia would have directly lost at least 15 billion euros and no one in the EU would have even thought of compensating for this“, he noted.
Vulin stressed that Serbia “is not ready to finance the war in Ukraine”. “And how little the EU cares about Serbia is shown by the fact that our sanctions against Russia would not cause even minimal damage to Russia, but would destroy us – and yet the EU insists on doing it“, said the Serbian deputy prime minister.
He said that Brussels had hatched a plan to overthrow Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic with the active support of Western intelligence agencies.
"Serbia will never forget Russia's contribution to the fight against Nazism", Vulin told TASS.
„We are not a nation of cowards and traitors, and we are not a nation that will forget that Serbia, as it is today, would not exist if Russia had not sacrificed at least one life for every one of our victims for freedom – in the wars against the Ottoman Empire, in the First and Second World Wars“, he added.
For Vulin, Russia is Serbia's "only strong historical ally". He has already confirmed his presence in Moscow for the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the Victory in World War II, as well as the participation of part of the Serbian armed forces in the parade on May 9, represented by an echelon of over 70 people.
Belgrade will not block the broadcasts of Russian media under any pretext, Vulin stressed.
"In Serbia, all European media, as well as Russian, Chinese, Ukrainian and Belarusian, are freely accessible and no one's property will be confiscated - under any pretext," he said.
At the same time, he noted that the EU "bans reports from all media that do not repeat what Brussels says". “All Russian-funded channels have been banned, the property of Russia and its citizens has been confiscated, and Serbia has been called a "dictatorship" because it does not ban media that is banned in the EU,“ Vulin noted.