Bloomberg: BiH as a field for Russia-NATO competition

(Patria) - The NATO alliance has "pushed Russia" in the fight for influence in the formerly "communist" East of Europe once already this year, and now it has "set its sights" on BiH, states the American agency Bloomberg.

After NATO membership was accepted for Montenegro, the alliance turned towards BiH, "a country where it initiated its first military operation in 1995," the agency states, as reported by N1 television portal.

"Although the NATO intervention helped to stop the fight between Muslims, Serbs, and Croats - in which at least 100,000 people died in the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia - tensions among ethnic groups have remained with the risk of boiling over."

The agency states that these tensions "increased even further last week," when NATO foreign ministers renewed a program "that had been stalled for a decade," the Membership Action Plan (MAP).

"While many Bosnian Muslims and Croats want a stronger connection with the NATO alliance, most Serbs, as well as their leader, Milorad Dodik, are intensely rejecting it."

Bloomberg quoted Dodik's recent statement in which he said he would not support any accession of BiH to any military alliance, including NATO.

Al Jazeera reports the agency's text, reminding that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier this month accused NATO and the EU of "accelerating efforts to continue to conquer the region" and of giving countries a "false choice" that they must join either Russia or the West, while NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg says that the Alliance would like to see BiH agree to additional measures necessary for eventual membership.