One of the reports mentioned a bomb planted in military facilities, causing the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina to raised their alert level.

By the time of publication of this article, officials had not released information about who was responsible for the incidents.

Although there is the possibility that in some cases the perpetrators were attention-seeking minors, military commentator Dean Dzebic, who writes for the Klix website, believes that security agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina are acting passively.

“Professionals and a good number of the academics in the security and defence field still perceive security in a Cold War way – a rifle, a cannon, a tank, the Berlin Wall and so on. Security threats have changed in accordance with modern tendencies that we do not yet follow, and if we do not follow them, we can only act reactively,” Dzebic said.

Experts believe that in the world of contemporary security, cooperation between agencies is one of the most important pillars of a well-functioning protective system. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also in the wider region, cooperation is at a low level, making it easier for people to create panic.

“These security threats simply oblige you to be part of the global system, and that’s actually the key thing. If you cannot deal with some security threats on your own, what you can do is to try to find in your immediate environment those who are willing to engage in a joint security architecture with you,” says Dzebic.

He explained that those who reject security-sector integration or cooperation on sensitive critical issues are potentially destructive factors.

Security expert Safet Music said that the entire Balkan region is extremely favourable for hoax callers because of the security-sector inadequacies cited by Dzebic. He also noted that investigations usually conclude by finding that the reports were false.

“We have to look at the wider picture. These phenomena in schools didn’t even originate in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but in the region,” Music argued.

He said that threats to important facilities must either be viewed in the context of regional political developments, or the hoaxers “simply want to show the insecurity and incompetence of the Bosnian leadership and its plans for future geopolitical positioning”.

Bosnia and Herzegovina lacks legislation on critical infrastructure

The European Union’s 2022 directive on the resilience of critical infrastructure expanded the list of sectors that need security protection to include energy, transport, banking, finance, health, drinking water and wastewater, as well as digital infrastructure, public administration, space, and food production and distribution.

But Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have a law on critical infrastructure, because it was withdrawn from the agenda of the Council of Ministers on September 24 this year.

Haris Delic, an expert in national and critical infrastructure security and a member of the Federation government’s working group for the drafting of the law, said that due to the lack of legislation at the state and entity levels, public security is being put at risk because parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina cannot be effectively protected without an integrated approach to security at the state level.

Delic added that adopting legislation regulating state property is a prerequisite for the adoption of a law to ensure the security of critical entities, because in absence of a clear definition of what state property is and what Bosnia and Herzegovina owns, it is impossible to know which critical entities should be protected.

“Without knowing which property is state-owned at the level of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we do not know fully and with certainty which [property] passes into the jurisdiction of the entities, district or cantons. Whatever is not state-owned by Bosnia and Herzegovina automatically becomes owned by the entities or some other lower level,” Delic explained.

The most recent targets of hoax calls have been state institutions with important roles in security and defence. Dzebic argued that the reaction was anachronistic, slow and inadequate.

“I think the best example is the Ministry of Defence, which did not have a cyber protection team, so the web page of the Ministry of Defence was shut down in order to prevent attacks and the crashing of the site,” he said.

Dzebic added that there are still people in state institutions who are trying to do to maintain the security of vulnerable infrastructure in any way they can with the means they have at their disposal.

He said that it is “a happy accident” that sensitive data in key institutions is still kept in written format, and therefore cannot fall into the wrong hands if there is a cyberattack.

He also noted that the purpose or consequence of hoaxes might be to show up the inadequacies of institutions in dealing with such alerts.

Military facilities interesting to Russia

Music said that there are certain political forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina that sometimes seek to prove that the state is dysfunctional.

“There is an interest group that would not have any problem if something happened and the state simply ceased to function and that ‘other political solutions’ were sought because of that,” Music said.

He added that the Western Balkans are part of a larger geopolitical picture, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Military facilities in Europe are of great interest to countries such as Russia. This week, the European Union took a step towards sanctioning Russia over a series of recent hybrid attacks and acts of sabotage, French news agency AFP reported.

In recent months, authorities in several EU countries, including Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have reported discovering plots or incidents, including arson attacks, that they believe were planned by Moscow.

In May 2024, the Financial Times reported intelligence service briefings about possible sabotage of facilities, including military facilities, on European soil by agents of the Russian Federation. In September, Norway reiterated its warnings of a possible escalation of hybrid warfare.

In March 2023, following dozens of hoax reports of bombs planted in Macedonian schools, airports, hospitals and police stations, Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski told media said threats had come from Russia and Iran as well as from within North Macedonia.

A similar explanation was given for incidents in Bulgaria in March 2024, when threatening emails were sent to more than 20 schools. Bulgarian Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said that the authorities suspected there had been a “Russian role” in the incidents, but not necessarily the Russian state directly.

As well as the incidents in these countries, false bomb alerts have been received in Serbia and Montenegro on several occasions in the past two years.

Haris Delic said that both Serbia and Croatia export weapons to Ukraine, but they do not experience as many bomb hoaxes as Bosnia and Herzegovina.

He declared that it is “certain” that these threats are being coordinated and that intelligence services and others connected to them are using the situation for subversive purposes in Bosnia and Herzegovina, both in synchronisation and individually.

“The Intelligence and Security Agency of Bosnia and Herzegovina must have precise data on this through its intelligence, and especially through its counterintelligence work, and should use the information to prevent such events and reports in the future, or if they happen after all, to promptly detect and prosecute them, either through its own bodies or in cooperation with Interpol and Europol,” Delic said.

In Serbia, Maja Bjelos of the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy says that identifying the perpetrators is the most difficult job, but even after the Serbian police and Security Information Agency have investigated, it is hard to detect a specific political motive.

“I’m not sure that bomb reports in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia can be linked to a single perpetrator; that is, a single state or state-sponsored non-state group of actors,” said Bjelos.

Some of the hoax callers were minors involved in the gaming scene, but the real picture has never become clear because all the cases have never been fully explained.

Recently, several diplomatic missions received bomb threats, which were linked to a Swiss citizen of Albanian origin, but according to Bjelos, this was connected to political disputes between Belgrade and Pristina.

A hoax report about bombs planted at several locations that was sent to the independent media outlet Nova S was also connected to domestic politics and the controversy over lithium mining in Serbia.

Although the identity of the hoax caller has not been established, it has been alleged that the intention was to discredit environmental activists, particularly because the message sent was that lithium mining, which has the backing of the Serbian government, could not be stopped.