The Pupin Initiative’s New Advisor and the Erosion of Truth in the Balkans

Hill’s diplomacy masks retreat as progress, recasting Serbia’s nationalist agenda as statesmanship while erasing hard truths. His new Pupin role cements Washington’s complicity in Balkan revisionism.

Christopher Hill has always been the sort of diplomat Washington likes to showcase, a steady hand, a veteran of difficult postings, a man who can wear the vocabulary of “engagement” and “complexity” as comfortably as a bespoke suit. In Belgrade, he has been the smiling American who knows the streets, who remembers the war years, who speaks with the easy fluency of an old Balkan hand.

But there is a difference between knowing a place and serving it. And over the past two years, Hill’s record shows not the impartial stewardship of an experienced envoy, but a consistent, calculated accommodation of the most illiberal tendencies in Serbian politics. He has not been a diplomat holding the line. He has been the line’s slow retreat.

When, in March 2023, Hill offered what amounted to an apology for NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia¹, it was framed as an act of candour, the human touch of a man willing to acknowledge the pain of all sides. In fact, it was something else entirely: a deli…