Anonymous claims Serbia is ‘Putin’s puppet’, Russia seeks to expand war in Europe and ‘distract the West’

Hacking collective Anonymous accuses Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic of acting as a “Putin puppet” as Serbia fuels conflict with Kosovo in a move Russia hopes will steer the West away from Ukraine.

“Russia is trying to open a new front in Europe to distract the West,” Ivana Stradner, adviser at the Barish Center for Media Integrity at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital.

“Russia does not want to send troops, tanks or planes into the Balkans where Kosovo and Serbia are located,” Stradner said. “What does Russia want to do [is] wreak havoc within the region, so the United States and our allies, so we don’t pay as much attention to Ukraine and Russia, you know, to be bothered by what’s happening in Kosovo. ”

Kosovo closed its border with Serbia last week as the two countries faced increasing tensions. Ethnic Serbs have set up barricades at the border to protest the arrest of a former police officer suspected of being involved in an attack on ethnic Albanian police officers, reports France 24.

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“Such an illegal blockade has hindered the free movement and movement of people and goods, therefore we urge our citizens and partners to use other border points for movement,” Kosovo Police said in a statement. .

Several shootings followed, with attacks on Kosovar police and international peacekeepers. Serbia’s armed forces remained on high alert, but Vucic appears to have eased tensions after reaching a deal on December 29 that would see the blockade lifted, the BBC reports.

Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, Russian Ambassador to Serbia, said that Serbia can rely on Russia regarding the situation in Kosovo, “despite serious challenges… in the context of a confrontation with NATO”, according to Russian news agency TASS.

“We continue to participate in solving the current international crisis, including in Kosovo,” said Botsan-Kharchenko. “We will continue to coordinate closely with Belgrade in defending Serbia’s legal rights regarding Kosovo and Metohija.”

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Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, but Serbia has never recognized it and has actively encouraged the country’s ethnic Serb population to challenge Kosovo’s authority.

The potentially chaotic situation has presented a major opportunity for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who treats Serbia as a “very close ally”, according to Stradner.

“[Serbia] does not border Russia, but in every way they support Russia regarding the war in Ukraine,” he said, adding that the Russian ambassador “had received additional instructions from Moscow on how to proceed” on the matter.

Although the blockade was lifted, Anonymous called Vucic and accused him of instigating the blockade at the request of Putin, who eventually declared war on Vucic.

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During the first week of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia attacked Ukrainian government websites. The use of cyber attacks prompted Anonymous to declare war on Russia and began targeting Russian websites and launching a series of “hack and dump” attacks.

The massive impact of the attack resulted in a large amount of information being leaked to the public, including the release of the personal data of 120,000 Russian soldiers, access to the Kremlin’s CCTV system, as well as gas pipelines outside Russia, according to AnonymousTV’s Twitter account. . (It should be noted that Anonymous, by nature, does not have a unique “official” account).

Soldiers of the NATO-led Kosovo Forces patrol near a road barricade erected in the town of Mitrovica, Kosovo, December 29, 2022.
(Predrag Milosavljevic/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Recent attacks hit more selective targets such as SIBUR, Russia’s largest petrochemical company, and those claims Vucic is “Mr. Putin’s puppet”.

“It has come to our attention that tensions and military provocations in northern Kosovo by Serb criminal elements are trying to provoke armed conflict,” the group said in a statement. a video posted on Twitter. “Serbia’s autocratic president Aleksandar Vucic, a puppet of Vladimir Putin, is trying to destabilize the region using the mechanisms of violence and terror of war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, but this attempt is known as suicide for him.”

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The threat created a bit of an uproar on Vucic, who responded by posting a photo of himself playing with his dog on Instagram with the message: “We are preparing for a war on anonymous.”

The group fired back saying, “#Anonymous is not a small group of people powerless to ignore, we are an organized and globally active collective of like-minded individuals and our message will be clear, if you don’t stop your dangerous acts in # Kosovo,” wrote the AnonymousTV Twitter account.

Dustin Carmack, cybersecurity, intelligence and new technologies researcher at the Heritage Foundation, cautions that while such disclosures may have good intentions, it is difficult to predict the ripple effect.

“You’ve seen this through the different intelligence disclosures over the last decade and the impact it has had in Europe and elsewhere,” Carmack told Fox News Digital.

“I think it’s really hard in the environment we’re in for anyone to judge – especially the hacktivist group who might have a slim picture of something that they think unfolds on one side, even if it’s… knowing that it could affect both-handed or third,” continued Carmack. “I would say [in] in this context, you don’t know the nature of Anonymous and who made these decisions.”

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“You don’t know what the final bond is for the people who make those decisions, and that makes it very difficult for British people or Americans or whoever,” he added.

Fox News Digital sent requests for comment to the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the US Department of State.