How Orbán’s Fall Changed Serbia’s Political Future

In the speech announcing his invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin took only minutes to arrive at the original sin in his catalogue of Western crimes. Before Iraq, before Libya, before Syria, came Belgrade: “First a bloody military operation was waged against Belgrade, without the U.N. Security Council’s sanction but with combat aircraft and missiles used in the heart of Europe.” The placement was not incidental, as Putin was telling Serbs that Russia’s war in Ukraine and NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia belonged to the same story, and that he, unlike t