The President of the Bosnia’s Serb-dominated entity Repuplika Srpska (RS), Milorad Dodik, said that regardless of him being included in the US blacklist, the RS suffered no consequence, which was more important than anything else.
Addressing the media in Banja Luka on Thursday, Dodik said he did not think the European Union would introduce sanctions against him as suggested by certain persons before the US Congress.
The RS President referred to the statement by Sasa Toperic, Senior Fellow and Director of the Mediterranean Basin, Middle East, and Gulf Initiative Centre for Transatlantic Relations, who spoke at the Wednesday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing in Washington, D.C.
“The US should reach out to our European partners and request them to follow the US sanctions on Milorad Dodik, with the set of their own, as Dodik’s separatist rhetoric continues to represent a serious threat to regional stability,” Toperic said.
The news agencies carried Dodik as saying that the EU’s countries are far more serious than Toperic’s recommendation, which he did not find to be “original at all”.
Balkan experts laid out a grim future for Bosnia and the Western Balkans on Wednesday at the House Foreign Affairs Committee Hearing in Washington, D.C., unless the United States and their allies step in and help solve the problems that threaten the peace in the region.
The US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) introduced sanctions on Dodik in January 2017. Then Acting OFAC Director John E. Smith said Dodik posed a “significant threat to the soveriegnty and territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
