by Saker’s Johnny-on-the-spot for The Saker Blog

We spoke too soon, it turns out, about the Dr. Vladimir Mentus, the young Serbian sociologist, being released from prison and charges against him being dropped. At one point several days ago the appellate chamber did vacate the of the misdemeanour court judge’s decision sentencing Dr Mentus to thirty days for participation in the protests, specifically for “insulting” the police, and remanded the case to the lower court for reconsideration in line with its analysis. So is Dr Mentus now back home with his family? Not at all, the lower court has resentenced him to 30 days in prison, but on slightly altered grounds that he participated in acts of disorder which resulted in damage to public property. That is the way the travesty known as the “justice system” operates in Vučić’s “European Serbia.”

But unenviable as the position of Vučić’s political prisoner Vladimir Mentus may be, the tyrant Alexander Vučić is in a far worse jam. He is caught in a pincer between the demands of his Western sponsors to sign off on the recognition of Kosovo, and the swelling internal discontentment which delegitimizes him. At present, but for its disgraced president Serbia does not have any legally functioning institutions. The cabinet’s mandate ran out over a month ago. Since constitutionally the President’s role is ceremonial (although additional powers belonging to other branches of the government were unlawfully seized by the usurper) if a legally binding decision on Kosovo were to be taken, it could be done only by the prime minister and the cabinet, which are currently in a lame duck, caretaker capacity. As for Vučić’s fraudulently elected “parliament,” which needs to change the constitution for the separation of Kosovo to be legally possible, it has not been constituted yet and diehard protesters have vowed to make sure it never is and are demanding the annulment of the phony elections. Without parliament to approve it, the new government cannot be legally constituted nor can the act of treason Vučić has obligated himself to commit be performed with an appearance of constitutional regularity. So those who engineered Vučić’s installation eight years ago must deal with their puppet’s meltdown just as the task for which they installed him – recognition of the narco-state of Kosovo – is going into high gear and approaching its projected climax.

Dr Vladimir Mentus will very likely be out of the pokey in thirty days, but will Alexander Vučić by them still be around?

Ultimately, that decision will not be made by the usurper, or even by the leaderless and unorganized Serbian people, but by Western power centers and their intelligence services. They are now assessing Vučić’s overall usefulness in light of the bloody mess that his stupid and inept conduct has created. They must, of course, also calculate into their equations the impending crash of the Serbian economy, with projected one million unemployed roaming the streets. Not to be forgotten is another significant category of victims, the 1,700,000 pensioners facing a drastic reduction in their monthly allotments as government income shrinks and foreign loans, taken out under even the most usurious conditions, become increasingly difficult to arrange. Faced with the obligation of paying off billions of euros in soon to mature debts due to international creditors, with the hefty interest that those loans carry, and looking after his jobless subjects or the pensioners whom Vučić has already fleeced with impunity on numerous occasions, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out what the cornered tyrant will do. The result will be a renewed explosion of social unrest compared to which the recent turmoil will seem no more than a minor bump in the road. These are huge factors shaping the hard-nosed assessment of Vučić’s viability by whoever is assessing his usefulness, and the folks doing the assessment right now as I write this are nothing if not hard-nosed.

Sidebar: The persistent rumor that a desperate Vučić, anxious to ingratiate himself with his Western masters, is ready to appoint the chief NATO lobbyist in Serbia, head of the Russophobic  Soros NGO CEAS (Center for Euroatlantic Studies), Jelena Milić, to the post of foreign minister or some other high position in the new cabinet, gained credence today. The main regime rag, “Informer,” published Milić’s letter to Tania Fajon and several other EU officials who were rather mildly critical of police brutality in Serbia, telling them that everything is fine and warning them not to interfere in the regime’s internal affairs. The odious Milić is ingratiating herself with Vučić, who may have decided already to use her to try to ingratiate himself with his Western NATO masters. If the despised Milić is appointed to any government position, even cleaning lady in the foreign ministry, in the long run that will not be the factor that could save Vučić, but it will be a slap in the face for Russia and clear proof that it miscalculated completely when it bet, however grudgingly, on the Serbian tyrant.

To this dismal picture should be added ominous warning signals that the same people who invented Vučić and put him in place are now busy reinventing him in the form of a resurgent Western financed “civic opposition,” ready to jump in and take over, possibly in a palace coup, should Vučić try to weasel out of the treasonous commitments made to his foreign masters.

These characters are, to be sure, just as despised as Vučić. As we pointed out in earlier sit-reps, they were booed off the stage and physically chased away by protesting patriotic citizens when they tried to mingle with the crowds to profit from the photo-op and misrepresent themselves as popular tribunes. They are, however, being organized by Vučić’s masters, persistently and with considerable fanfare, as Serbia’s potential shadow government in waiting. After a suitably arranged “color revolution,” they would be ready and able to complete their predecessor’s job. If the usurper is on sleeping tablets, there are sound reasons for his distress.

To sum up, Vučić is the man that absolutely no one is happy with. The population loathes him for his disastrous and injurious policies and sees through all his lies. His Western backers have good cause to be upset and impatient, while harbouring serious doubts about his further utility. Their problem, as well as Vučić’s, is how to neutralize popular discontentment, which so far has not shown the concerted strength required to overthrow the rotten system, but has nevertheless proved seriously disruptive. Most concerning of all, its potential for further radicalization, especially if the unstable tyrant again overreacts and creates a catalyst for popular mobilization, presently is a “known unknown,” but still very much on the minds of all concerned.

Vučić’s ultimate fate will be unpleasant, but it will most likely be decided by his obviously dissatisfied foreign sponsors, not by anything he does. A new team eager to prove its loyalty and plunder the little that is left of Serbia is waiting in the wings and the condemned, lonely man in the presidential palace knows it.

If Vučić’s fate is not settled in Serbia (which for him would be the most unpleasant option), he will have to look for a corner of this earth where his pestilential presence would still be tolerated and where he and the remnants of his criminal entourage might have access to the fruits of their immense plunder. Since deposed and no longer useful puppets of the globalist system, after being discarded, with remarkable regularity become global fugitives, finding a safe haven will be an incredibly complicated challenge.

That is why with all his current travails, the young scholar Dr Vladimir Mentus is in far better shape than Serbia’s pathetic Ozymandias, the “great” bumbler and nincompoop, Alexander Vučić. The bright young man at least has a future, and the prison time he can simply chalk up to life experience. Who knows, it may even result in a brilliant sociological dissertation.