Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has announced that the US has postponed the imposition of sanctions against the Serbian oil industry (NIS) by just four days, meaning that they will be imposed from 1 October.
On 10 January, the US put Serbia’s largest oil company on the sanctions list because of the so-called “secondary risk” of having most of the company’s shares owned by Russia, which continues its aggression against Ukraine.
Sanctions against NIS have been postponed six times so far, most recently until 26 September. During this period, Serbian authorities have been in talks with both the Russian and US sides.
“We have been extremely fair to both our Russian partners and our American partners. We will try to be fair, but people should know that we will have to pay an extremely high price,” Vucic said in an address to Serbian media in New York, where he is attending the UN General Assembly session.
Vucic said Serbia was a “collateral victim in the relationship between the Americans and the Russians”.
“We are undoubtedly going through difficult times and a hard winter awaits us,” he said.
Meanwhile, the ownership structure of NIS has changed several times. In September, Russia’s Gazprom withdrew from NIS ownership, and another company run by Gazprom, St. Petersburg-based Intelligence, became one of the significant owners.