The Serb member of Bosnia and Herzegovina's three-member Presidency, Milorad Dodik, in cooperation with Russian diplomats, tried to prevent Bosnia's ambassador to the United Nations from voting in favour of a General Assembly resolution on Wednesday condemning Russia's invasion on Ukraine.

Nevertheless, Bosnia voted to support the resolution on Wednesday evening. Serbia too voted in favour. A total of 141 countries were in favour, 35 abstained, and only 5 were against the resolution – Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Syria, and Russia itself.

On Thursday, a letter that Dodik, a staunch supporter of Vladimir Putin, had sent in his capacity as a member of the Bosnian Presidency to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres before the vote surfaced in the Bosnian media. Since the beginning of the invasion seven days ago, Dodik repeatedly refused to join the two other members of Bosnia’s collective head of state body – the ethnic Croat, Zeljko Komsic, and the ethnic Bosniak, Sefik Dzaferovic, in condemning the invasion, insisting that his position on the matter is “neutral.”

Dodik apparently had sent the letter to Guterres through the Russian mission to the UN, and in the letter, Dodik claims that Bosnia “doesn’t have a position” on the Ukraine crisis.

Diplomats from the Russian mission – which lost 12 members last month as US authorities moved to expel them from the country for espionage activities – had conveyed Dodik’s letter to Guterres, local media reported. In the letter, Dodik claimed that Bosnia’s ambassador to the UN, Sven Alkalaj, did not have the authority to support the resolution condemning Russia’s aggression, and demanded that Alkalaj should be prevented from casting his vote on the resolution.

Dodik further accused Alkalaj of what he called “abuse of power” and also of “threatening the reconciliation process and the reforms achieved in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”

“Bosnia and Herzegovina has to be impartial and neutral and not support any side in the conflict, but instead support peace and a peaceful solution to this situation,” Dodik said in the letter, which was published by the Bosnian news website Klix.ba.

Dodik was placed under US sanctions in January for what the US government described as “destabilizing corrupt activities and attempts to dismantle the Dayton Peace Accords, motivated by his own self-interest, which threaten the stability of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the entire region.”

Dodik proceeded with veiled threats, adding that should his letter be ignored, a situation would emerge of “unlawful representation based on false pretences exclusively aimed at spreading misinformation that does not portray the real situation in Bosnia,” which he said would “further destabilize the situation in the country.”

Prior to Wednesday’s vote at the UN, Dodik tried to engage in a debate on the Ukraine crisis at a meeting of the three-member Presidency in Sarajevo. Since the other two Presidency members, Komsic and Dzaferovic, took a completely opposite stance on the Russian aggression, Dodik’s move is considered to have been an attempt to formally demonstrate that the country does not have a uniform position on the matter.

However, Komsic and Dzaferovic declined Dodik’s motion, saying that the country’s collective leadership had already taken a stance on this same issue back in 2014 in the wake of Russia’s occupation and annexation of Crimea. Back then, Bosnia’s Presidency – which at the time included Komsic, as well as Bosniak politician Bakir Izetbegovic and Serb politician Nebojsa Radmanovic – said it was “necessary to preserve the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine.”

In 2022, Komsic and Dzaferovic insist that this is still the unchanged position of Bosnia, which also applies to the recent invasion on Ukraine.