The Second Front Runs Next Door

Russia’s Belgrade embassy has grown from 54 to 78 diplomats since the invasion while every neighbour cut theirs. The operations it is linked to targeted the accessions of Montenegro, North Macedonia and Bosnia and the status of Kosovo. Albania borders three of the four.

by Ngadhnjim Brovina (Regional Affairs Desk)

Albania’s diplomatic list carries sixteen Russian diplomats, one of them an assistant military attaché. Albania has expelled none of them since the invasion of Ukraine. Montenegro expelled twelve in 2022 and lists four. North Macedonia expelled fourteen and lists fourteen. Greece expelled twelve. Bulgaria expelled 83 and lists eighteen. Serbia has expelled no one, and the Serbian foreign ministry’s own lists show why the region should mind: 54 Russian diplomats in Belgrade in February 2022, 62 in March 2023, 68 in February 2024, 78 on the list dated 14 September 2026.

On 25 September Agentstvo, the Russian investigative outlet, placed 29 of those 78 in or near the Russian services, from leaked address and payroll records: 19 in the GRU and defence-ministry column, six of them the military attaché’s office itself, the rest FSB and SVR. Leaks are not a court record and Agentstvo says “linked or possibly linked”. One name needs no leak. Aleksei Ivanenko was expelled from Zagreb in April 2022 as a second secretary and was in Belgrade by October as a first secretary; Radio Free Europe traced him to the FSB’s 16th Center, whose officers the US indicted for breaking into energy networks. He is still there.

An embassy that grows by 44 per cent while every neighbour’s shrinks is not watching Serbia.

In December 2025, according to the New York Times, Putin told his intelligence chiefs and commanders at a closed meeting that the goal for 2026 was the collapse of NATO and the EU from within; officials from two countries described the meeting. The same report places Moldova at the centre of that effort, and one of its camps in western Serbia: set up by the Russians in the summer of 2025, with GRU-linked instructors, to train cadres for election interference. Moldova’s police said the trainees had been taught in Serbia by representatives of Russian special services, and detained 74 people six days before the vote. Serbia’s Interior Ministry arrested two Serbian citizens for organising combat-tactical training near Loznica for 150 to 170 Moldovan and Romanian citizens. On 15 October, beside Ursula von der Leyen, Vučić said he could not claim it was a Russian service (“Ja ne mogu da tvrdim da je to ruska služba”), and that Serbia had established the presence of three Russian citizens at the camp. By his own account, an operation the Times places inside the December effort ran on Serbian soil with Russians present.

In October 2016 the GRU tried to stop Montenegro’s NATO accession with a coup on election day; the two Russian officers convicted in absentia had operated from Serbia. In 2017 a leak from Macedonian counter-intelligence, published by OCCRP, described a decade of Russian effort to keep Macedonia out of NATO and recorded that the SVR officers in Skopje answered to the residency in Belgrade. In July 2018 Greece expelled two Russian diplomats for working against the Prespa agreement, the deal that put North Macedonia in the alliance beside Albania. In March 2022 Russia’s ambassador in Sarajevo said on Bosnian television that if Bosnia chose NATO, Russia would respond, and that Ukraine showed what to expect. And the Russian embassy’s chancery in Pristina, staffed from the Belgrade roster under the UNMIK umbrella and never accredited by Kosovo, has since August 2025 been headed by Ilia Uvarov, whom RFE/RL found in March in the Molfar database of intelligence-linked Russians.

Montenegro’s accession, Macedonia’s accession, Bosnia’s accession, Moldova’s election, Kosovo’s recognition: in every case the Russian state was working to keep a country out of NATO or the EU, or to keep its status unsettled. In December 2021, two months before the tanks moved, the Kremlin published two draft treaties demanding that NATO admit no further members and pull back to its 1997 line. Ukraine was the answer to that demand at the line of contact. The Balkans are the answer behind it.

The second front is the map of Albania’s borders. Montenegro to the north, North Macedonia to the east, Kosovo at Albania’s back, and behind all three the capital whose Russian establishment is the largest in the region and the only one that has never lost a man to expulsion. A front behind the line requires only that it stay open: Montenegro’s membership attacked on election day, Macedonia’s fought for a decade, Kosovo’s recognition kept incomplete with a Russian office in its capital that Kosovo never vetted.

Albania’s government has said the right things. Rama backed Berlin’s attribution of the Leipzig drone attack to Russia within the day and called it no grey zone; at Cernobbio he called Mladić a butcher while Belgrade was burying him with honours. The sixteen names in Mjull-Bathore are the smallest part of Albania’s exposure. The larger part is a partner. For a decade Tirana has vouched for Belgrade, in Open Balkan and in every room in Brussels and Washington where Albania’s word on the region carries weight. In that same decade the partner housed a regional residency to which documented operations against Albania’s neighbours repeatedly lead back, grew it while every neighbour cut theirs, and promoted the officers those neighbours expelled. When a Russian military attaché was filmed handing cash to a retired Serbian officer in 2019, he left with Peskov’s regret and no expulsion. Serbia’s deputy prime minister is a man the US Treasury sanctioned in 2023 for facilitating Russia’s malign activities in Serbia and the region.

At NATO, Albania can ask whether a Russian hub of this size, in a non-member bordered by three allies, is an alliance matter, since the operations against those allies’ accessions led back to it. In the enlargement debate, where Tirana’s voice is now among the loudest, it can ask whether the Union should keep negotiating accession with the capital that hosts the hole in Europe’s expulsion regime while Albania races to close its own chapters. Zagreb, Skopje, Podgorica and Sofia each closed their door in 2022. The corridor between them runs through Belgrade, and Albania lives at its southern end.