Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vucic, has long been accused of exercising total control over the Western Balkan country. Now, he has declared that he will personally file criminal charges against everyone he accuses of the "economic sabotage of Serbia."
This was prompted by news from the United States that Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and close confidant of US President Donald Trump, has canceled a huge, much-vaunted planned investment in Belgrade. Kushner proposed redeveloping the site of the Yugoslav army's former General Staff building and replacing it with luxury apartments, a hotel and a casino. Serbia's government had backed the project and offered him a 99-year lease.
The building, which was the military and defense headquarters of Yugoslavia, was badly damaged by NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo war in 1999. The General Staff building is a monument to Yugoslav modernist architecture; many in Serbia also consider it a symbolic memorial in Belgrade's administrative center. Consequently, there were huge protests about the planned redevelopment. Critics of the project also suspected corruption.
"Because meaningful projects should unite rather than divide, and out of respect for the people of Serbia and the City of Belgrade, we are withdrawing our application and stepping aside at this time," a spokesman for Kushner's company Affinity Partners said on Monday (15.12.2025).
That same day, Serbia's public prosecutor's office for organized crime filed an indictment against the minister of culture, Nikola Selakovic, and three other officials. They are accused of unlawfully removing the cultural heritage status of the General Staff building. President Vucic, who has ruled Serbia with an iron fist for 13 years and essentially controls the media, police, and judiciary, reacted with anger.
The president announced that he would personally file criminal charges against "all those who participated in the witch hunt and the destruction of the investment," specifically including public prosecutors. "We will now be left with a destroyed building, and it is only a matter of time before bricks and other parts start falling off it, because no one will ever touch it again," Vucic said to journalists.
Pro-government media went further still. Instead of Serbia, it said, Kushner would now be investing in a project on the coast of neighboring Albania. The tabloid newspaper Informer takes the view that the "blockers" — the defamatory term for demonstrators who protested against the plans to redevelop the General Staff building — must be held accountable. But there is a lot more at stake than just the investment itself, which was reported to be worth €750 million ($880 million).
Serbia has been rocked by massive popular protests for more than a year now. These started after the concrete canopy of the newly renovated railway station in Novi Sad collapsed in early November 2024, killing 16 people. Serbian students are at the forefront of the protests, and at times, all the universities in the country were blockaded.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been demonstrating. The students have demanded elections and have prepared their own list of candidates. Opinion polls give the list a good chance of defeating Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Vucic has tried to discredit the protests as a "colored revolution" directed by the West, but has not provided any evidence of this.
Meanwhile, the public prosecutor's office for organized crime is investigating not only the renovation of the main station in Novi Sad, but also the case of the General Staff building in Belgrade.
Nenad Lajbensperger from Serbia's Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, as well as many of his colleagues, refused to remove the building from the register of cultural artefacts.
"Every instance of the destruction of cultural heritage is a crime, and punishable. If someone does this to his own country, it is clearly an act of treason," Lajbensperger told the independent weekly magazine Vreme.
Many observers believe that Belgrade was trying to entice Donald Trump with the Kushner deal, as part of Serbia's balancing act between the EU, Russia, and China. A Serbian pro-government paper even paid for billboards to congratulate Trump after his election victory.
"The unwillingness of Kushner's firm to take any risks shows that this project was never crucial for them," comments the political scientist Milan Krstic. "This despite all attempts by the government in Belgrade to suggest otherwise."
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In reality, there is growing tension with Washington. US sanctions are affecting the Serbian oil and gas giant NIS, which is majority-owned by Russia's Gazprom. Moscow refuses to sell its share of the company, and Washington refuses to make an exception. Serbia's only refinery, in the city of Pancevo, near Belgrade, is already shut down. "Instead of a renaissance of relations with the US, we're seeing the opposite," Krstic told DW.
Critics of the government responded to Jared Kushner's withdrawal with muted celebration. They also questioned what would now happen to the area around the General Staff building, since the parliament had passed a special law to remove its protected historical monument status.
A new investor will come, students at the Belgrade School of Electrical Engineering posted on the social media platform X. "But he too will know what awaits him if he tries to destroy our cultural heritage." The Serbian public, they wrote, was "united, strong, and determined to defend the General Staff — even when it seemed impossible."
The dismantling of public institutions in Serbia, which the students and citizens are protesting, has started to attract the attention of the European Union. Brussels considers neighboring Montenegro almost ready to accede to the Union. Meanwhile, EU candidate country Serbia is still the problem child of the Western Balkans.
This article has been translated from German.
