The arrival of 40 British soldiers to Bosnia and Herzegovina caused a torrent of comments. Although the British Embassy denies that their soldiers will influence the elections in any way, the President of the Republika Srpska (RS) entity Milorad Dodik publically said that the British intelligence officers are disguises into a military unit.
The Times's announcement that British soldiers are coming to Bosnia to prevent Russia's influence on Bosnia’s general election was interpreted differently by everyone.
The British Embassy, as well as the Foreign Ministry of that country, announced that the mission was not directed against Russia or any other country, and that soldiers are sent at the request of EUFOR, a military deployment in Bosnia to oversee the military implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the war in this country, in order to improve the security in Bosnia.
Russian Ambassador to Bosnia Petr Ivantsov voiced his concern over statements by British Secretary of Defense Gavin Williamson. He added that sending a reinforcement to EUFOR’s Althea mission because of the general election sends a wrong message – that the situation in Bosnia is tense.
Dodik, on the other hand, was more critical when he said that “40 British intelligence officers disguised into a military unit are coming to Bosnia and their task will be to listen in, monitor and create information for the media.”
Edward Ferguson, the British Ambassador to Bosnia responded to these accusations on his Twitter account, saying:
“I do not have to tell my children goodnight stories. Instead, I only read them the fairy tales from RTRS.” RTRS is the official TV channel of the RS entity.
A ReStart activist Velizar Antic thinks that all this is in the function of pre-election campaigns, and so the stories of revolutions and the spreading of fear are nor popular.
“We are small, the RS has only one million inhabitants. We can’t influence the global flows, we are here to look at our interest, to elect the people who will lead us the best. And the stories of what the British and the Russians will do here doesn’t depend on us, nor can we influence it in any other way,” says Antic.
