The past and the furious: How Russia’s revisionism threatens Bosnia

While this number of troops is insufficient, the contrast with the situation just a few years ago – when the closure of the Office of the High Representative and EUFOR looked imminent – indicates that Western states now recognise the fragility of the peace in Bosnia, a quarter of a century after the war there ended. [...] (One of them, Igor Girkin, would go on to play a crucial role in Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.) In the aftermath of the war, Russia sent a delegation to the Dayton peace conference, contributed troops to the NATO-led peacekeeping operation in Bosnia, and took a seat on the Peace Implementation Council, a multilateral forum that formally oversees the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreeme. [...] A crisis that recently erupted in Bosnia around the Office of the High Representative’s plan to change the constitution and the country’s election law is indicative of the lasting split between the EU and the US regarding the use of the Bonn Powers. [...] The proposal caused a great deal of controversy in Bosnia, as it includes a gerrymandering component that would favour the HDZ BIH in elections – although other parts of the package are designed to address the dysfunctionality of the FBIH and to remove HDZ BIH’s veto over the workings of the FBIH. [...] The current announcement that the Office of High Representative would impose changes to the election law – while promising to remove a number of institutional blockages in the FBIH – would change the method of electing delegates to the upper chamber of the FBIH parliament, which would then also affect the appointment of the delegates to the upper chamber of the Bosnian parliament.