BELGRADE: Bosnian Serb leaderMilorad Dodik arrived Thursday in Moscow to attend Victory Day celebrations, despite an arrest warrant against him over accusations he flouted the divided Balkan nation’s constitution.“Moscow is a beautiful city,” Dodik, a Kremlin ally and leader of Bosnia‘s Serb statelet, wrote on X, while Russian media published footage of him at the airport.Dodik, 66, is wanted by Bosnia’s central judiciary after a series of secessionist moves, but continues to defy an arrest warrant issued in mid-March.

Since the end of its ethnic war in the 1990s, Bosnia remains split into two highly autonomous halves — the Serbs’ Republika Srpska (RS) and a Muslim-Croat Federation — linked by a weak central government.It was previously announced that the RS delegation in Moscow would also include the Serb member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zeljka Cvijanovic, and the Speaker of the RS Assembly, Nenad Stevandic — who is also wanted on suspicion of “attacking the constitutional order” in Bosnia.Dodik previously visited Moscow at the end of March.The RS president, who has led the Serb statelet since 2006, was sentenced in February to one year in prison and banned from holding political office for six years for failing to comply with decisions of the international high representative who oversees the peace accord in Bosnia.He rejected the trial as “political” and responded by banning the federal police and judiciary from operating in the Serb statelet.Federal prosecutors deemed his actions secessionist and opened an investigation, but he has not been arrested because of the risk of destabilising the fragile Balkan nation.Leaders from around 25 countries, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, are expected to attend the military parade in Moscow on Friday.Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic also arrived in Moscow, where he will meet Vladimir Putin despite warnings from the European Union that it would look unfavourably on countries engaging with Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.