BELGRADE, Serbia — The leaders of Turkey and Serbia suggested on Friday that their countries could jointly produce military drones, months after Turkey’s delivery of drones to Serbia’s neighboring Kosovo sparked anger in the Serbian capital.
While Serbia originally planned to purchase Bayraktar military drones from Turkey, it announced in 2023 that it had abandoned the plan in response to Turkey’s delivery of drones to Kosovo, a former Serbian province that declared independence in 2006 that Serbia does not recognize.
Kosovo’s leaders said the five Turkish drones would increase their ability to defend against a possible Serbian attack. In 1998-1999, Serbia brutally cracked down on Kosovo Albanian separatists, prompting a 78-day NATO air war to stop the bloodshed.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said last year that the delivery of drones to Kosovo was “not easy and bad news for us, and it will affect our relations” with Turkey. He said that Serbia will look to acquire the drones elsewhere.
However, the populist Serbian leader appeared to have a change of heart on Friday when he hosted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Belgrade.
“The Turkish military industry is much stronger than ours,” Vucic said at a joint press conference with Erdogan. “But, without false modesty, we cannot be neglected either. Within this framework, I see room for extensive cooperation.”
He said that “we are not interested in wars, but we must have enough power to deter someone.”
Asked whether joint military-industrial cooperation would include the production of Bayraktar drones, Erdogan said: “Serbia has certain capabilities, we have certain capabilities, and as friendly countries we can develop our capabilities together.”
“There are people in the world who will look positively at our cooperation and those who will not like it, that’s natural, but since we are leaders, we must make these decisions sovereignly together with our partners,” he said.
During his visit to friendly Albania on Thursday, Erdogan said he would hand over an unspecified number of Bayraktars to the Balkan country “so that no one would dare to attack it.”
Another Serbian neighbor, Bosnia, has expressed interest in acquiring drones of the same type, while Romania, a NATO member, has already included the Bayraktar TB2 UAV in its military inventory.
Serbia has recently been beefing up its armed forces with sophisticated equipment, including a $3 billion order this summer for 12 French-made Rafale fighter jets.
The Rafale sale to Russia’s ally Serbia, which has occasionally taken an aggressive stance toward its Balkan neighbors, has raised some concerns, one of which is how France plans to prevent the transfer of sophisticated Rafale technology to Russia.
Most of Serbia’s neighbors are members of NATO and the European Union. Vucic says Serbia will never join NATO because of its “aggression” in Kosovo.
Serbia is formally seeking EU membership, but under Vucic’s increasingly autocratic rule, it has made little progress on the rule of law and democratic reforms that are key prerequisites for membership of the 27-nation bloc.
