Selim Ibraimi- Three decades after the Dayton Agreement (1995), the US administration of president Donald Trump decided to remove senior officials of Republika Srpska from the sanctions list. Last week, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Treasury Department in Washington lifted sanctions on serbian ultranationalist leader Milorad Dodik and a member of the presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Zeljka Cvijanovic. The Treasury Department did not provide additional explanations for the decision. It is believed that the sanctions imposed in the last decade, strengthened during 2020, 2024, and 2025 by the former administration of president Joe Biden, were finally lifted on Tuesday with the help of serbian-american lobbying firms financially supported by the serbian government of BiH. Until recently, Milorad Dodik was the president of the Serbian Republic of BiH, who agreed to resign after a bosnian court banned him from politics due to radical actions and corrupt connections.
Following the Treasury Department’s decision, Milorad Dodik wrote with joy on the X network: “I am grateful to President Donald Trump and his associates for correcting a grave injustice inflicted on Republika Srpska, its representatives, and their families. An injustice perpetrated by the Obama and Biden administrations. The decision to lift sanctions is not just a legal correction, but also a moral vindication of the truth about Republika Srpska and all those who have served it with honor. Once again, it has become clear that the accusations made against us were nothing more than lies and propaganda from the chaos created by Christian Schmidt, a chaos that must now be undone. To those who, over the years, found pleasure in these lies and believed the slander of others, I can forgive everything, except for the years we lost because they believed that Republika Srpska would disintegrate.”
“Today, it is clear that Republika Srpska will never disintegrate,” Dodik said. “Thank you to the Trump administration for lifting all sanctions imposed on President Dodik, his family, and his associates in Republika Srpska by the Biden and Obama administrations. It is a new day in the Balkans, where Serbian and Croatian Christians can hope for true autonomy and closer ties with the United States,” Rod Blagojevich (D), former governor of Illinois (2003-09), and president of RRB Strategies LLC, commented on the X network. According to estimates, this decision has come from several positive moves taken by the BiH authorities.
What decisions did the Assembly of Republika Srpska make that led to the US lifting sanctions on senior Republika Srpska officials? State Department officials told Radio Free Europe (RFE/RL) that on October 18, the General Assembly of the Serbian entity adopted a law repealing laws that had already been declared invalid by the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They include the Law on Immovable Property, the Law on Non-Enforcement of Decisions of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Electoral Law of Republika Srpska, the Law on Prohibition of Activities of Extra-Constitutional Institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Law on Amendments to the Criminal Code of Republika Srpska, and the Law on the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council of Republika Srpska. Readers should be aware that former Serbian President Milorad Dodik was convicted by a Bosnian court for signing a law calling for the non-enforcement of decisions of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In addition to the one-year prison sentence, which he later commuted to a fine, Dodik was also banned from holding public office for six years. The General Assembly also invalidated 12 parliamentary conclusions of December 2024.
While Milorad Dodik was president of Republika Srpska, in mid-March of this year, it approved a draft aimed at a new constitution that would redefine the republic as a state of the Serbian people, with the right to self-determination up to and including secession. The latest moves in Washington may be in contradiction with the House of Representatives’ own bill called the “Western Balkans Democracy and Prosperity Act” (H.R. 5274), which states, among other things, that “it is the policy of the United States government not to pursue any policy that supports territorial exchanges, partition, or other forms of border redrawing along ethnic lines in the Western Balkans as a means of arbitrating disputes between nation-states in the region.”
It further states that the law should support pluralistic democracies in the Western Balkan countries as a means of preventing a return to the ethnic conflicts that once characterized the region. After Dodik and other radical serbian leaders have spoken and acted openly for secession from the federation, have refused to implement the Dayton Agreement, and have always worked for the region to enter a phase of territorial changes. All this can be considered as a fog in american foreign policy.
Despite the removal of Dodik and dozens of individuals from the american blacklist, the British government announced that former serbian leader Milorad Dodik remains on the UK blacklist, which also represents a major difference with the US approach. Recently, Dodik met with senior Russian officials in Minsk. He and Serbian officials from Republika Srpska, together with russian diplomats, agreed to take the same position and draft a report on the High Representative, Christian Schmid, who, according to them, is not working effectively. “Today’s meeting was an opportunity to confirm to Lavrov that Republika Srpska and Russia remain at a high level of strategic cooperation,” said Dodik.
After this meeting, it was not long before he spoke in Belgrade with former serbian intelligence officer Aleksandar Vulin and with senior representatives of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Removing Dodik and other individuals from the US sanctions list will encourage other leaders in the Balkans to take unsavory actions in violation of all international agreements reached since 1995. Some see this as a lobbying victory, others as a blow to the Dayton Agreement. Washington’s sending of mixed signals inadvertently rewards radical rhetoric not only in BiH, but in the Balkans as a whole, with the risk of repeating the same precedent
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