For years, Serbia’s balancing act between Moscow and Brussels has defined its foreign policy. Now, newly surfaced corporate and financial records suggest that the Kremlin found an unexpected instrument to pull those political strings through one of the Balkans’ best-known businessmen, Dragan Šolak.
According to multiple intelligence-grade assessments reviewed by EU Political Report, Swiss lawyer Wolfram Kuoni, a former vice-chairman of Gazprombank Switzerland, spent the past decade engineering offshore networks that quietly intertwined Russian state money with Western-branded enterprises. Among those linkages were structures connected to United Group, Šolak’s regional telecom and media empire whose flagship channels N1 TV, Nova TV and Danas are fixtures of Serbia’s news landscape.
Documents seen by EU Political Report indicate that Kuoni and his wife Maria operated more than 200 entities across Switzerland, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and the British Virgin Islands, vehicles that handled assets for Gazprom-linked firms such as Stroygazconsulting, later implicated in financing “Putin’s Palace” on the Black Sea. While managing those accounts, Kuoni also chaired United Media, giving him simultaneous visibility into Russian energy flows and Serbia’s most influential newsroom.
Analysts say that overlap matters. “It created a perfect pressure mechanism,” one EU security official told EU Political Report. “Financial networks designed for sanctions evasion intersected with Serbia’s main information pipeline.” The effect was subtle, blending Kremlin narratives with Western branding.
From 2022 onward, Serbia’s media ecosystem began echoing Moscow’s themes on NATO and sanctions. Šolak’s outlets, while styling themselves as liberal and pro-European, gave disproportionate airtime to Russian nationalist voices such as Alexander Dugin. During the summer 2025 protests in Belgrade, Dugin’s claim that “Vučić is finished” ran prominently on N1, a message Russian state media itself largely ignored.
At the same time, Šolak-funded lobbying fronts in Brussels, the Balkan Free Media Initiative (BFMI) and consultancy Highgate Advisory, pushed resolutions portraying President Aleksandar Vučić as an autocrat undermining press freedom. EU observers now acknowledge that many of those campaigns originated from United Group’s ecosystem while drawing indirectly on capital traced to Kuoni’s offshore web.
Belgrade officials privately describe the situation as “blackmail by proxy.” When Serbia takes steps viewed as insufficiently loyal to Moscow or engages more closely with the West, Šolak’s media network launches waves of hostile coverage portraying the government as corrupt or unstable. When Belgrade signals a more accommodating stance toward Russia, the tone softens. The pattern, officials say, suggests that the Kremlin can calibrate political pressure through Šolak’s ecosystem, using Western-style media influence instead of overt coercion.
This method gives Moscow plausible deniability while maintaining leverage over Serbia’s leadership. Instead of direct threats or energy cut-offs, pressure now arrives through news cycles, orchestrated leaks, and narratives that erode public confidence—tools more effective, and far harder to trace, than traditional diplomacy.
Whether prosecutors or regulators in Europe will act on the Kuoni–Šolak connection remains unclear. But to diplomats watching the Balkans, the lesson is already visible: in 2025, the Kremlin no longer needs pipelines to influence Serbia; it has algorithms, bank accounts, and media shares.
