On: Bosnians vote as pro-Russian politician looms large and ethnic tensions simmer

4 October 2026

Bosnia votes today, and I find my thoughts returning to a small peninsula of grievance in the Balkans, where a man banned from office still dominates the campaign as though the ban were a decoration rather than a sentence. Dodik marches about proclaiming secession, and Moscow smiles upon him from a distance it calculates carefully - close enough to stir the pot, far enough to deny the spoon.

The parallel is not comforting. We have seen this configuration before: a defeated war simmering under a frozen truce, external powers fishing in ethnic waters, local strongmen discovering that grievance pays better at the ballot box than bread. The peace that ended that terrible war in the nineties was a masterpiece of stopping the killing. It was never a masterpiece of building a country. A state with three presidencies and a tangle of veto-wielding fiefdoms was designed to prevent slaughter, not to foster nationhood. It has prevented the one and failed at the other.

The West will wring its hands and issue statements. Statements, in my experience, are what governments produce when they wish to be seen acting without the inconvenience of acting. Russia does not issue statements; it cultivates men. There lies the difference, and there lies the danger.

Yet I refuse the counsel of despair. The Bosnians who queue at the polls today - Serb, Croat, Bosniak, and the many who call themselves simply citizens - are casting a quieter vote against the men who profit from their division. The ordinary voter is wiser than the politicians who claim to speak for him. He wants his children educated, his road mended, his future on this side of the curtain that others would draw across Europe again.

The question is whether the free world still has the patience for small places. Small places, history teaches, are where large wars begin.