Russia has lost the influence it had here after the fall of the Soviet Union and the fear the US is spreading now is to make the peoples in the Balkans and Europe engaged in preventing the return of Russia to these territories, said foreign affairs analyst Hajrudin Somun.

Speaking for N1’s Dan Uzivo programme, Somun commented on the US intelligence report which among other things warned of a possible armed conflict in the Western Balkans in 2019.

“There will be no war,” said Somun, a former journalist and diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East.

According to him, too much room is given to “an assumption” and the report is being too much dramatized. Only two sentences of the report were actually dedicated to the Balkans, he said.

The goal is, Somun believes, to spread the fear in order to make the Balkans and Europe get engaged into preventing Russia’s comeback to these territories.

An armed conflict requires much larger military forces, which is not the case now, he assessed.

“This is not the 1990s when the Soviet Union was falling apart. America left the Balkans to local nationalisms back then. The situation is different now,” said the former diplomat.

“I think the great powers would not allow an armed conflict unlike in the 1990s. After all, we had the situation in 1999 when the NATO bombed Serbia. They took one such dramatic action to prevent a larger armed conflict in the Balkans,” said Somun.

The US intelligence community issued a report for 209 according to which the Western Balkans may face a risk of open military conflict in 2019, while Russia is lurking to take advantage of the situation.