Serbia’s president trashes international law, smears Trump as a strongman thug — and uses the chaos to deny war crimes in Kosova.
by Elmi Berisha | 19 January 2026
Aleksandar Vučić may not have meant to insult Donald Trump.
But that is exactly what he did.
In a striking statement on Sunday, January 18, Serbia’s president declared that international law is “dead,” that the world now lives in a “thug’s world,” and that the West made a “huge mistake” by recognizing Kosova. Then came the punchline: Donald Trump, Vučić said, is simply more “honest” than Bill Clinton was in 1999 — because Trump doesn’t bother pretending that power is moral. He just takes what he wants.
Read that again.
Vučić is saying Trump runs the world like a thug.
Not a statesman. Not a leader constrained by law. A strongman who operates openly, transactionally, without excuses. And Vučić presents this not as a criticism, but as an improvement — more honest, less hypocritical.
That is not praise. It is a confession.
Vučić is admitting that he believes the world is run like a protection racket — and that Trump, in his view, proves it. And he deploys that worldview for one clear purpose: to deny Serbian crimes in Kosova.
Vučić did not stop at attacking international law. He went further. He flatly claimed that no genocide — and effectively no serious crime — occurred in Kosova. According to him, the United States and NATO “invented” a humanitarian disaster in 1999, lied about Serbian actions, and used fake morality to justify force.
That claim is not controversial. It is false.
Kosova’s case was never built on some imaginary genocide label. It was built on documented facts: ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, civilian killings, and systematic terror carried out by Serbian forces. Nearly one million Kosovars were driven from their homes. Mass graves were later uncovered inside Serbia itself. Serbian officers testified. Serbian state records confirmed what happened.
Those are not talking points. They are bodies and documents.
Vučić knows he cannot win that argument. So he avoids it.
Instead, he attacks the very idea of law and morality. If the world is run by thugs, then crimes do not matter. There are only winners and losers. Serbia was not guilty — it was just weaker.
And this is where Trump comes back in.
Vučić is speaking directly to Trump-aligned instincts when he says, in effect: You understand this world. Power decides. Law is a joke. But the subtext is unmistakable. Trump is not moral, in Vučić’s telling — he is simply honest about being ruthless.
That is a remarkable thing for a foreign president to say about an American leader.
Vučić is effectively arguing that Trump governs the way a gangster does business: no rules, no shame, just leverage. And if Trump is the face of the new global order, Vučić says, then stop lecturing Serbia about war crimes. Stop talking about Kosova. Stop pretending there is right and wrong.
That is not realism. It is moral bankruptcy.
And here is the final irony. Vučić appears to believe this rhetoric will play well with Trump-world audiences. He seems to think calling Trump an “honest” strongman is flattery.
It is not.
It is an insult wrapped in cynicism.
Because what Vučić is really saying is this: Trump does not bother with law. Trump does not care about justice. Trump simply takes.
That is the world Vučić is selling — not just a story about America, but a worldview meant to erase responsibility for Kosova.
If this is the “honest” world Vučić wants, then honesty requires saying this plainly: denying documented crimes while portraying the U.S. president as a thug is not courage.
It is desperation.
About the author:
Elmi Berisha is a prominent Albanian-American community leader and businessman based in the New York area, best known as the President of the Pan-Albanian Federation of America "Vatra", the oldest Albanian American organization in the United States, founded in 1912.
