BELGRADE, August 8. /TASS/. Pro-Western opposition in Serbia is ready to use the protests planned for August 10 in Belgrade to seize the presidential palace and eliminate the president, the Vecernje Novosti newspaper reported.
"In the last phase of the plan for August 10, the organizers of the protest, if they think that there are enough people in the crowd that ready to resort to violence, will call on protesters to suddenly move toward the presidential palace and, amid unrest, attempt to capture and then assassinate President Vucic. If they succeed, they will start a campaign of unprecedented proportions through their own media and friendly foreign media, with the aim to show that the assassination was a result of a spontaneous expression of general popular discontent and not an act of organized crime by the opposition and foreigners. As their ‘reasoning,’ they will use the narrative that the so-called environmental protests were a genuine popular uprising from the beginning, even though so far we have seen and documented countless examples that almost all protests were organized by opposition parties and their satellites," the article said.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that the assessment of the situation in Serbia indicated that malicious forces resumed attempts to destabilize the country.
On July 19, Serbia and the European Union signed a memorandum of understanding on strategic partnership in the field of raw materials, which called for environmentally clean production of lithium in Serbia.
The Serbian opposition is strongly opposed to possible lithium mining, saying it could put at risk the lives of people and harm the environment. It called for nationwide protests.