Garcevic Speaks at European Parliament on Russian Influence
Ambassador Vesko Garcevic, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was invited by the European Parliament Committee on Foreign Affairs and Subcommittee on Security and Defense to take part at a public hearing on Russian Influence in South-East Europe.
The hearing was co-chaired by David McAllister, Chair of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Anna Fotyga, Chair of the Subcommittee on Security and Defense.
Amb. Garcevic took part in the hearing alongside Dimitar Bechev, Research Fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina and USA and Nonresident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council; and Marko Ceperkovic, Associate Analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris, France.
Participants called the EU to be more engaged in the Balkans. Though Russia can’t be a viable alternative to the EU, it plays a role of a spoiler, utilizes the existing loopholes in the EU and Southeast Europe in order to capture and hold the political space in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Macedonia and expands its perceived geostrategic sphere of interest, according to Amb. Garcevic.
During his diplomatic career, Amb. Vesko Garcevic dealt with issues pertinent to European security and NATO for almost 14 years. In 2004, he was posted in Vienna to serve as Ambassador to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He had been a Montenegro’s Ambassador to NATO from 2010 until 2014 and served as a Montenegro’s National Coordinator for NATO from 2015 until he joined the faculty at the Pardee School.