Fighter Jet Deal At Centre Of Macron's Serbia Trip

Expectations are high that France and Serbia will sign a deal worth billions of euros to supply fighter jets to the Balkan country during a visit by President Emmanuel Macron to Belgrade that kicks off Thursday.

The Rafale fighter jet deal is looming large over the French president's two-day visit, after President Aleksandar Vucic told AFP that he hoped to seal the agreement this week.

The deal to purchase the French Rafale jets would be one of several agreements inked during the visit, according to Vucic.

"There are thousands of things that we'll have to discuss tomorrow. There are many memorandum of understandings and many contracts that we're going to sign tomorrow," Vucic said during an interview Wednesday.

"I believe that we'll finish everything successfully regarding our military-technical cooperation, which means that Serbia might become a member of (the) Rafale Club, which is a huge, huge contract."

A source with the French presidency said "intense discussions" were ongoing and hoped a deal could be reached during Macron's visit.

Macron is expected to arrive around 1600 GMT on Thursday evening.

Vucic told a Serbian state broadcaster late Wednesday that financing for the fighter jet agreement was no longer an issue, while adding that some unspecified "guarantees" still needed to be ironed out.

France has been ratcheting up its economic ties with Belgrade in recent years, with trade between the two countries tripling in the past 12 years, according to Serbia's finance ministry.

French company Vinci has been overseeing a years-long renovation of Belgrade's Nikola Tesla airport, and French groups are set to build the capital's first metro station and a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant.

Belgrade-based analyst Vuk Vuksanovic said that Vucic likely saw the Rafale deal as crucial for ensuring France's support in the future.

The president "believes that by purchasing these Rafales, which are an extremely expensive product of the French military and industry, he will buy President Macron's favour and political protection," Vuksanovic, a senior researcher at the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy, told AFP.

If signed, the agreement would mark the latest in a string of moves by Serbia to curry favour with Europe.

In July, the European Union and Serbia signed a deal to develop the country's supply of lithium -- seen as a crucial building block to achieve Europe's transition to a green economy.

The Serbian government reinstated the licences for a controversial lithium mine this summer after revoking in 2022 the permits granted to Rio Tinto following a string of demonstrations over environmental concerns.

Despite the mass protests, Vucic has vowed to remain firm in his support of the project and said the country willingly chose to sign a deal with the EU, despite having potential offers from outside of the bloc.

"We made our choice. It was the EU," Vucic told AFP.

Vucic has also acknowledged that Serbia had sold hundreds of millions of euros' worth of ammunition to Western countries that has likely been shipped to Ukraine as Kyiv fights off invading Russia troops.

The sales come even as Serbia remains an outlier in Europe after refusing to join sanctions against Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The Balkan country has been reliant for years on support from the Kremlin and Beijing to prevent the United Nations from recognising Kosovo as an independent state.

Serbia has been a candidate to join the European Union since 2012, but its prospects are seen as bleak without a normalisation of relations with Kosovo.

Belgrade has refused to acknowledge the declaration of independence by majority-Albanian Kosovo in 2008, following a bloody war between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents in the late 1990s.

In a letter published by the Serbian press on Thursday morning, Macron said Serbia "fully belongs" in the EU, while acknowledging many in the country had grown frustrated with the pace of the accession process.

"Today, I come to Serbia again with a simple message: The European Union and its member states need a strong and democratic Serbia within their ranks," wrote Macron.

"And Serbia needs a strong and sovereign European Union to defend and promote its interests while respecting its identity."