Vucic: Serbia is under pressure in the UN vote, NATO fighter jets approaching the Serbian airliner
Xinhua News Agency news Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic disclosed on the 7th that Serbia wanted to abstain in the vote of the United Nations General Assembly to suspend Russia’s membership of the United Nations Human Rights Council, but some forces pressured Serbia to impose oil trade sanctions. Threats to force the Serbian side to vote in favor.
Vucic also said that an Air Serbia passenger plane was on its way from Moscow, the capital of Russia, to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, before it left Russian airspace when it was approached by a fighter jet from a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This kind of behavior is not safe for civil aviation. threatening.
[Threats of sanctions]
The United Nations General Assembly held an emergency special session on the Ukraine issue on the 7th, and voted on a draft resolution put forward by the United States and other countries expressing serious concerns about the “continuing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine” and called for the suspension of Russia’s membership in the Human Rights Council. The vote was 93 in favor, 24 against, and 58 abstentions. Resolution passed.
In an interview with Serbian Radio and Television later that day, Vucic said: “People ask why we didn’t vote against or abstain. It’s just that if we abstain, some other countries will oppose us and the pressure will increase. Today, a decision on Serbia’s fate is coming, whether we will be excluded from the scope of the oil sanctions (on Russia).”
“Our decisions have been controlled and we have been subjected to countless serious pressures…” Vucic said, “They are blackmailing our country.” Vucic did not specify who the pressurers were or where they were driven, but said: ” We had to vote this way out of fear of sanctions against Serbia.”
According to a report by the US “Toward Freedom” news network on the 5th, due to the sanctions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies, Serbian oil company NIS will stop importing crude oil from Russia via EU member Croatia, and will stop on May 15. 56.15% of the company’s shares are held by Gazprom and thus fall under the EU’s fourth round of sanctions against Russia.
Vucic said: “We are a neutral country militarily, but not politically. We are on the European path.” According to him, he does not want Serbia’s path to join the EU to be “suspended”.
[Symbian Airlines is frequently harassed]
Serbia is also the only country in Europe that maintains air route operations with Russia. An official report submitted by Air Serbia pilots shows that on the 6th, an Air Serbia Airbus A330-200 passenger plane was flying from Moscow to Belgrade when it was flying in the Russian airspace not far from the border between Russia and Latvia. Air traffic control alerted that there was another aircraft nearby.
The report said that two minutes later, the Russian air traffic control sent another reminder. The Cypriot pilot saw a gray fighter jet within sight. According to Vucic, it was an F-15 fighter jet from a NATO country, 2,000 feet (609.6 meters) below the Cypriot plane. The plane then turned right and flew away.
“The incident was disturbing. The discomfort did not go away until we left Russian airspace,” the pilot wrote in the report.
Vucic said that Serbia has asked Russia and NATO to provide further information. “We want to find out who is playing this game, threatening passengers with fighter jets flying around and why. We have the exact coordinates of where this fighter jet appeared. We are under enormous pressure because Serbia is the only European countries where Moscow and St. Petersburg remain on the route.”
According to the “Former Yugoslav Aviation News Network”, since the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict on February 24 this year, Serbia Air has become a target of harassment for maintaining its flight to Russia. Flights receive bomb threats almost daily. On the evening of the 7th, Air Serbia evacuated the ticket office in downtown Belgrade for the second consecutive day after receiving an anonymous e-mail saying that there were explosives in the building. And these threats have so far been “fraud bombs.”
Some Air Cypriot employees have also been included in an “assassination list” on the Internet. Serbian law enforcement authorities are investigating these incidents as terrorist offences. Some of the threat information was assisted by a foreign intelligence agency, law enforcement officials said.