Unholy alliance: How Moscow turned to priests and bikers to topple Montenegro’s rulers after failing with guns
The IndependentAt last, Montenegro was about to turn a corner. “Russia is not a nation, but a state of mind.” Senior Montenegrin officials accused Moscow of using the church to undermine the country, just as it had attempted a coup four years ago to prevent it from joining Nato in 2017. “The Kremlin was trying to do it for a long period after the Montenegrin government officially decided to align with Nato,” says Ljubomir Filipović, a former Montenegrin politician based in the resort city of Budva. “But there is no reason to believe that a battle won is a war won.” The original religion law was meant to allow the state to take back property owned by the powerful church if it could not prove that it had owned it before 1918, when Montenegro was made part of Serbia in a pan-Slavic federation. But a 100-page report released 15 October by the Sofia-based Center for the Study of Democracy identified the eastern Orthodox church as “one of the Kremlin’s favourite soft power niches,” an instrument of power it has used in the Balkans, eastern Europe and Greece and Cyprus.
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