As the United States and Europe condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, Sasa Bozic responded by opening the Putin Café in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka, decorating it with a mannequin of the Russian president — a foot taller than Vladimir V. Putin is in real life.
Today, with much of Europe horrified at President Trump’s attack on President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office, Mr. Bozic has a new project: a motel and restaurant complex called “Trump and Putin’s Place.” He plans to open it this summer.
Paying tribute to Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, Mr. Bozic said, is not political — just “a “marketing trick” that works in Banja Luka. Since the 1989 collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, many in the mostly ethnic Serb city and surrounding region have looked favorably on Russia and with hostility on an American-led order in Europe that Mr. Trump appears intent on upending.
A Biden Café, Mr. Bozic said, would never work, even less an eatery named after President Zelensky, but “everyone here likes Putin and Trump.”
Banja Luka is the capital of Republika Srpska, a Serb-controlled region of Bosnia and Herzegovina that was born from the ethnic cleansing of the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. That violence more than three decades ago punctured hopes that the demise of Communism would open a new era of prosperity and harmony. It gave an early foretaste of the appeal and destructive power of ethnonationalism, a force now resurgent around the world.
The Serb region has for decades felt out of step with — and victimized by — what it views as a hostile, American-dominated world order committed, at least in principle, to human rights, democracy and territorial integrity.
Many ethnic Serbs have regarded Russia, which shares their Orthodox Christian faith, as a protector against the West, which intervened militarily during the 1992-95 war to help Bosnia’s Muslim populations and again in 1998 to break Serbia’s grip on Kosovo.
Serbs inside Serbia and beyond its borders in Bosnia still harbor bitter memories of NATO bombings in the 1990s.
Now many feel that things have changed with the return of President Trump.
“Trump’s America is different,” said Mladen Ivanic, a former prime minister of Bosnia’s Serb enclave. While opposed to the region’s ethnonationalist leadership, he hopes the new administration in Washington will be more sympathetic to Serb concerns. But he also sees tumult ahead.
“We are now living in a new world where everything is possible, even conflict between America and Europe,” Mr. Ivanic said. “I never thought that was possible.” He added that he believed that “Trump has no interest in the Balkans,” but his demolition of longstanding assumptions about what the United States stands for has “changed everything.”
The change has dismayed former Communist countries that, thankful for Washington’s hostility to Moscow during the Cold War, count themselves as loyal American allies.
Vytautas Landsbergis, a former leader of Lithuania who led his Baltic nation, then still a Soviet republic, to declare independence in 1990, described Mr. Trump’s confrontation with Mr. Zelensky as a crude betrayal.
“They invited a guest, beat him up, spat on him, and threw him out the door,” Mr. Landsbergis said. “What happened in Washington is an extremely low level” that “has never been seen before.”
Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity trade union leader in Poland and a global symbol of resistance to tyranny, on Monday joined former political prisoners to send a letter to President Trump voicing “horror and disgust” at his hectoring of President Zelensky, saying it reminded them of their encounters with imperious Communist-era officials.
For those who see the United States as a bully rather than a liberator, the prospect of Washington turning its back on old verities has been met with glee.
Milorad Dodik, the Republika Srpska’s embattled leader, has been fishing eagerly in the troubled waters stirred up by President Trump. He praised the Oval Office confrontation with Mr. Zelensky, who had been trying to correct Mr. Trump’s depictions of the origins of the war in Ukraine, as a triumph for “truth” over “fairy tales.”
Hoping that Washington will rally to his side against Bosnia’s central government in Sarajevo, Mr. Dodik recently hosted a visit to Banja Luka by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Mr. Trump’s former attorney. Mr. Giuliani arrived shortly before a Bosnian court convicted Mr. Dodik of flouting the rulings of an international official overseeing implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement.
That agreement, brokered by the Clinton administration, put an end to more than three years of ethnic conflict in Bosnia and has kept the peace since.
Mr. Dodik, who has long embraced Russia as his protector, is now looking to Washington for help. In a letter to Mr. Giuliani, he wrote: “You and President Trump understand better than anyone the ruthless nature of the deep state and the lengths they go in attacking political opponents.”
The visit did not go entirely as planned. Mr. Giuliani obligingly portrayed Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country from which Mr. Dodik has repeatedly threatened to secede, as a menacing hotbed of Islamic extremism and wore a MAGA-style hat with the words “Make Srpska Great Again.” But he inadvertently insulted his host by calling him a “Bosnian,” a label that Mr. Dodik uses for Muslims.
A day after Mr. Giuliani attended a rally of Mr. Dodik’s ethnic Serb supporters, the enclave’s leader was sentenced in absentia last week by the Sarajevo court to a year in prison and barred from holding public office for six years. He says he does not recognize the court’s authority.
Mr. Dodik’s outreach to Washington, said Damir Kapidzic, a professor of politics at the University of Sarajevo, has been motivated by his desire to stay out of prison and get U.S. sanctions against him lifted.
“He has his back against the wall,” he said, adding: “He hopes the uncertainty that Trump has thrown into the world will help him.”
Mr. Kapidzic said this uncertainty bodes ill for a shaky American-backed order in the Balkans whose stability depends on U.S. cooperation with European countries.
A return to war, he said, was highly improbable — too many young people of fighting age have moved abroad and there are no large stocks of weapons, as there were when Yugoslavia fell apart.
But, Mr. Kapidzic said, Bosnia risks a destabilizing scramble for influence between outside powers, including Russia, China and Turkey, “if the Trump administration decides to completely pull back from supporting the multilateralism that ended the Balkan wars.”
Aleksandar Trifunovic, the editor in chief of Buka, a news site in Banja Luka, agreed that a return to the violence of the 1990s was unlikely, though there have been threats against the judge who ruled against Mr. Dodik.
More worrying, he said, was an unraveling of the norms that have kept Bosnia together as a state, albeit a highly dysfunctional one. Mr. Dodik last week vowed to purge “traitors” — ethnic Serbs who worked in his region for the police and other institutions under the control of the central government in Sarajevo.
“We will hang their names on plaques wherever we can, in the media and everywhere,” he said. “We will not tolerate betrayal.”
Mr. Trifunovic said that Mr. Dodik has been emboldened by President Trump’s campaign against the “deep state,” particularly the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and Elon Musk’s denunciation of the aid agency — without substantiation — as a “criminal organization.”
“It is very dangerous,” Mr. Trifunovic said, adding that he had never received grants from U.S.A.I.D. but had still been accused by Mr. Dodik as being part of a group of “criminals” using American money “to destroy the Republika Srpska and Milorad Dodik.”
Drasko Stanivukovic, the opposition mayor of Banja Luka, said he disagreed with Mr. Dodik on many things but shared his hope that President Trump would help ethnic Serbs protect their identity and territory. “We are all cheering for Trump here,” he said. “The world has been ruled by liberal values for too long.”
Tanja Topic, a Banja Luka political commentator for a Serbian magazine, said the increasingly aggressive mood reminded her of the 1990s.
“There are the same poisonous narratives, the same people but thankfully no guns this time,” she said. Politicians like Mr. Dodik, she added, “don’t like rules and have put a big bet on Trump.”
