Milijana Rogač was walking to work in late February when she got a push notification from a local tabloid reporting that police were raiding the offices of several Serbian civil society organizations. Among them: her own office at the Center for Research, Transparency and Accountability, where she works as executive editor of the fact-checking outlet Istinomer.
When Rogač texted her colleagues for confirmation, they said no police were at the office in Belgrade. But the tabloid had actually gotten advance notice. About 20 minutes later, a half dozen armed officers appeared. For more than 24 hours, some members of the organization’s staff weren’t allowed to leave, and others worked in shifts to photocopy thousands of pages of documents for the police while authorities conducted interviews about the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Until very recently, USAID was a longtime pipeline for the U.S. government to distribute foreign aid, including to journalists in countries that struggle to sustain credible, independent media. In Serbia, Istinomer is dedicated to fact-checking as part of CRTA’s overall work to support free and fair elections, and encourage democratic culture and civic activism in Serbia.
USAID was a major agency before President Donald Trump retook office in January, employing about 10,000 people around the world. But his administration has moved swiftly to shutter the agency, slashing its budget, firing employees and alleging fraud. Trump has made the fraud claim without offering any evidence, and it’s echoed around the world.
When Serbian police arrived at CRTA on Feb. 25, they were there at the behest of state prosecutor Nenad Stefanović to investigate potential corruption in connection with USAID. Stefanović has pointed to statements by U.S. officials such as Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and billionaire Elon Musk as impetus for the raids. He said the country’s special anti-corruption department had contacted the U.S Justice Department for information about the purported misuse of USAID funds and “possible money laundering” of American taxpayer dollars in Serbia.
“It was intimidation,” Rogač said. “It was a display of force. And I think, unfortunately, they managed to do what they wanted.”
There’s no evidence that CRTA was violating the terms of its USAID contract. The International Fact-Checking Network, which has condemned the raids, called CRTA a “reputable civil society organization,” and Istinomer a respected member of the fact-checking community. There’s a sense, Rogač said, that if it could happen to CRTA, “it can happen to anyone.”
“The biggest threat from this raid is not necessarily against us, but against journalists, people at the local level, whistleblowers — all the people who are actually trying to fight for accountability, and who are providing critical evidence of corruption at all levels of government,” she said.
After a deadly train station collapse in Serbia in November, protesters have repeatedly demonstrated against Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. He has blamed the demonstrations on civil society groups like CRTA, warning in a March 9 TV appearance that “those who directly received money from abroad to carry out a color revolution” would see “surprises in the coming days.”
CRTA editor-in-chief Milena Popović, who translated Vučić’s comments in an email to Poynter, said the president mischaracterized an environmental investigation into an attempt to oust him.
But it’s a “smear campaign,” Popović said — not a smoking gun.
And while the Serbian government has previously tried to intimidate independent media, fact-checkers in the region told Poynter, the government has stepped up its harassment thanks to fresh political cover afforded by the Trump administration.
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Before Trump’s inauguration, the U.S. government supported independent journalism in more than 30 countries, with most of that money coming from USAID, funding training and support for journalists in “places where public interest journalism is chronically underfunded and often under attack,” the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said. Serbia, a small Balkan country that was once part of Yugoslavia, has historically had to balance influences between the United States, the European Union and Russia.
Authoritarian leaders often use “foreign donors” to discredit independent journalism, the institute said, naming Serbia among the places where journalists are “already feeling the consequences” of USAID funding cuts under Trump. Newsrooms have been forced to scale back their coverage and lay off staff.
A May 14 story by Istinomer and fact-checkers in Slovakia and Georgia — Demagog.sk and FactCheck Georgia — reported that their respective governments have all recently claimed protests there were orchestrated by foreign actors. In Georgia, the story said, the ruling Georgian Dream party said “the West and international organizations such as USAID” had incited a coup through nongovernmental organizations and activists. In Serbia, a member of the country’s Progressive Party posted on X that CRTA was “financed by an organized criminal group, USAID, which used money from drug trafficking covering Mexican cartels. They were preparing chaos and a color revolution in Serbia,” according to the story.
Tijana Cvjetićanin, head of fact-checking at Zašto ne, a civil society group in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, said that while the threat of government retaliation against reporters is long entrenched in the region, it’s been shocking to watch a former partner supporting a hostile narrative against independent media.
What’s new, Cvjetićanin said, is “seeing support for such ways of thinking from a very unusual place” — the United States. Narratives of foreign actors plotting to overthrow the government aren’t new in Serbia. But while once considered fodder for conspiracy theories, these ideas are now gaining mainstream traction in the United States, Cvjetićanin said. And authoritarian governments are using this turn of events to revive old attacks against journalists working to hold them accountable.
“This is something that we were used to hearing from political actors on the right, those whose politics are very open nationlists, those who oppose any or all democratic standards of government,” she said. “We were not used to hearing the exact same narratives coming from, for example, the government of the United States.”
Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., recently visited Belgrade, where a Trump International Hotel is slated to go up on land owned by the Serbian government. The New York Times reported that the trip “offered perhaps the most explicit mixing so far in President Trump’s second term of U.S. foreign policy and the Trump family’s financial interests.” But a spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr. said he was in Serbia “in his capacity as a podcast host.” While he was there, he interviewed Vučić for his show, “Triggered.”
Their conversation touched on Trump’s first term, Russia, the war in Ukraine, and the recent Serbian protests. Both men claimed without offering evidence that nonprofit groups had improperly used USAID funds in connection with the protests, the Times said.
About a week later, thousands of protesters again rallied in the streets, this time against the planned complex that would include a Trump hotel.
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Reporters without Borders has called on the European Union to condemn the police raid on CRTA, which the Paris-based nongovernmental organization likened to the techniques used to intimidate journalists during Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s reign.
“Emboldened by Donald Trump’s toxic rhetoric and freezing on foreign aid,” the group said, “the pressure exerted by the Serbian government on the media has reached levels not seen since the 1990s.”
After dining with Vučić March 25, a month after the raid, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on X that Serbia “needs to deliver on EU reforms, in particular to take steps toward media freedom, the fight against corruption and the electoral reform.”
Darko Brkan, executive director of Zašto ne, told Poynter that the recent raids in Serbia are among many ongoing attacks against civil society and journalists in the region, but his concerns about democratic backsliding extend beyond Eastern Europe to the United States.
“Everything is at stake,” Brkan said.
CRTA, meanwhile, has filed a criminal complaint against Vučić and Stefanović, among others, alleging the unauthorized handling of the information and documentation seized during the raid. Namely, Vučić shouldn’t have access to it under Serbian law, the organization says.
“We knew that this was coming at some point,” Rogač said. “We know this government. We know how to recognize repression, democracy decline, and what’s happening, so we are not surprised, in a way.”
But, she added, “our work is so important, and whatever we feel at the moment, we have to hold the line, do the facts and do our work.”
