In a shocking statement delivered over the weekend, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said that leaders in the United States and the United Kingdom, including then-President Bill Clinton, asked the Hungarian government to invade Serbia in 1999 during its war with the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
In a televised press conference on Saturday morning, the Serbian president informed the public that U.S. and UK heads of state urged Hungary, which had joined NATO earlier that year, to have its military invade Serbia from the north to divide the Yugoslav armed forces between northern and southern fronts, the Croatian news portal Dnevnik reports.
“So, in 1999, Hungary was supposed to attack Serbia by land, Orbán confirmed to me and said that I can say that publicly. Clinton and the British asked [Orbán] to attack Serbia from the north so they could extend our forces from Kosovo to Vojvodina, which he refused,” President Vučić said, adding that Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor at the time, had “helped Orbán to reject the pressure from the White House.”
Vučić then relayed what Orbán, who at the time was one year into his first term in office, told him had occurred when he traveled to the United Kingdom for talks with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher.
Upon opening the door to greet him, Thatcher told Orbán: “It bothers me a lot that you refused to attack Serbia because more British soldiers will die,” Vučić said.
Vučić also criticized the European Union’s proposal to admit Kosovo to the United Nations and announced that Serbia and Hungary have agreed to extend the Druzhba oil pipeline—a pipeline that runs from Russia to Ukraine to Hungary—so that Serbia can receive Russian Urals crude.
The agreement to extend the Druzhba oil pipeline to Serbia comes on the heels of the European Union’s adoption of its eighth sanctions package against Russia, which among other things, bans maritime shipments of Russian oil.
The 128 kilometer long pipeline extension is expected to be completed within 18 to 24 months.
