Russia's war in Ukraine is causing concern in Bosnia. Here's why
Despite being almost two thousand kilometres away, Russia's invasion of Ukraine still hit too close to home for many in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Ravaged by a brutal and bloody war in the 1990s that saw 100,000 casualties and two million people becoming either refugees or internally displaced in a country of 3.5 million, Bosnians are acutely aware of what Ukrainians are going through.
After Moscow's invasion in late February, images of empty supermarket shelves and long lines for passports in the capital Sarajevo appeared in local media outlets, as Bosnians braced for the worst.
Others cleaned up their cellars, which had been used as shelter from the indiscriminate shelling and sniper fire in Bosnia's besieged cities.
“Just in case” has become the unofficial motto for most people ever since the war.
It is not simply the spectre of another war that is causing jitters. Some fear Russia flexing its muscles in Ukraine and Serbia being a key ally of Moscow will add fuel to the increasing assertiveness of the Bosnian Serb separatist movement.
Miran Kovačević, 25, from Tuzla, a city in the north of Bosnia, saw the first signs of rising fears after his parents began to insist he should renew his passport in late 2021, months before the war in Ukraine.
“They’d constantly implored me, ‘please go get your passport renewed.' So I asked them, ‘come on, what’s the big deal?’” Kovačević, who works as a project manager at a local radio station, told Euronews.
“So at some point, we sat down and they said that the situation is no longer stable. 'The same things happened before the war, and we kept repeating it wouldn’t happen,' they said.”
"That's the biggest fear of my parents' generation: war can come to you anyway, no matter how many times you
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