Turkey and Serbia suggest they might jointly produce military drones

The leaders of Turkey and Serbia suggested Friday that their countries might jointly produce military drones, months after a Turkish shipment of unmanned aircraft to Serbia’s neighbor Kosovo sparked anger in the Serbian capital.

While Serbia had initially planned the purchase Bayraktar military drones from Turkey, it announced in 2023 that it had abandoned the plan in response to Turkey’s delivery of drones to Kosovo, a former Serbian province which in 2006 declared independence which Serbia does not recognize.

Kosovo leaders said that the five Turkish drones would boost their ability to defend against another possible Serbian attack. In 1998-1999 Serbia violently cracked down on Kosovo Albanian separatists, prompting a 78-day NATO air war to stop the bloodshed.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said last year that the delivery of the drones to Kosovo “is neither easy nor good news for us and it will affect our relations” with Turkey. He said that Serbia would seek to purchase drones somewhere else.

However, the populist Serbian leader appeared to have changed his tune on Friday when he hosted Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Belgrade.

“The Turkish military industry is significantly stronger than ours,” Vucic said at a joint news conference with Erdogan. “But, without false modesty, we are not to be neglected either. Within those frameworks, I see room for great cooperation.”

He said “we are not interested in wars, but we must have enough power to deter anyone."

Asked whether the joint military industry cooperation would include the production of Bayraktar drones, Erdogan said: “Serbia has certain capacities, we have certain capacities and as friendly countries we can develop our capacities together.”

“There are people in the world who will look favorably on our cooperation and those who will not like it, that is natural, but since we are leaders, we should make these decisions sovereignly together with our associates,” he said.

During his visit to friendly Albania on Thursday, Erdogan said it will donate an unspecified number of Bayraktars to the Balkan country “so no one could dare to attack it.”

Another Serbian neighbor Bosnia has expressed interest in the purchase of the drones of the same type and NATO-member Romania has already incorporated Bayraktar TB2 UAVs into its military inventory.

Serbia has recently been strengthening its armed forces with sophisticated hardware, including an order placed this summer for 12 French-made Rafale fighter jets for $3 billion.

Selling Rafales to Russian ally Serbia, which has occasionally expressed an aggressive stance toward its Balkan neighbors, has raised some concerns, one of which is how France plans to prevent sophisticated Rafale technology from being shared with Russia.

Most of Serbia's neighbors are NATO and European Union members. Vucic says Serbia will never join NATO because of its “aggression” over Kosovo.

Serbia is formally seeking EU membership, but under Vucic’s increasingly autocratic rule it has made little progress in the fields of rule of law and democratic reforms, which are the main preconditions for membership in the 27-nation bloc.