Prof. Orhan Dragaš, PhD

When the appearance of truth overtakes truth itself, trust breaks. The BBC scandal proves it again. When a story outweighs facts, credibility disappears. That’s exactly what I examine in The Power of Perception. Reality is fragile. @chiselbury @Waterstones @goodreads @AmazonUK

I posted this post 3 weeks before the elections in Serbia.

Contestants on Slagalica, Serbia’s most-watched television quiz show, broadcast on national public broadcaster @RTS_Vesti, received copies of my book The Power of Perception: When Reality Loses the Battle as gifts.

Proud to share that The Power of Perception is coming to Turkish readers. Algının Gücü: Gerçeklik Savaşı Kaybettiğinde will be published at the end of October by @destekyayinlari . My sincere thanks to @yeldac and to the entire Destek team for believing in this book. Reality may be losing the battle. The debate is only beginning. #AlgınınGücü #Perception

“The greatest danger lies not in a lie occasionally passing as the truth, but in people gradually abandoning the need to distinguish between the two.” “Perception becomes the measure of truth. And truth becomes invisible without perception.”

Until recently, even making complete rubbish with AI required one basic skill: You had to be able to write a sentence. Voice commands have now removed that unfortunate obstacle. You can be functionally illiterate, mumble some half-baked nonsense into your phone, and have a political campaign video ready in minutes. Serbia’s election campaign is a glorious demonstration of just how far we've come. The sheer volume of spectacularly awful clips is difficult to explain any other way. People who could barely string two sentences together can now share their wisdom with the entire country, complete with music, special effects and subtitles. The technology is artificial. The stupidity, I'm afraid, is entirely authentic.

Two years ago, I was branded a fascist for expressing views that European governments are only now beginning to acknowledge. In October 2024, I published two articles for @KyivPost. In the first, on 20 October, I wrote that it was a lie to describe Russia's invasion of Ukraine as "Putin's war", and naive to believe that ordinary Russians did not support it. The war enjoyed broad support from the majority of Russian society. Seven days later, on 27 October, I explicitly called for a drastic tightening of visa restrictions on Russian citizens. I argued that Russian society should also face the consequences of a war it so widely supported. Russian bots called me a fascist. Unfortunately, many European social democrats and liberals joined them, lecturing me about human rights while Russia was killing Ukrainian civilians every single day. Today, Finland and Estonia are calling for an EU-wide ban on tourist visas for Russian citizens. Germany, Poland and Sweden are also pushing for tighter restrictions, while the European Commission is under growing pressure to go further. Unfortunately, this is happening far too late. In 2025 alone, Schengen countries issued 477,878 tourist visas to Russian citizens. How many of those who entered Europe were Russian intelligence operatives or sleeper agents waiting for orders from Moscow? How many are still operating freely on European soil today? We have no reliable public figures, but Russian espionage and sabotage operations across Europe already pose a serious security threat. What I publicly called for two years ago is now on the official agenda of European institutions. I wish Europe had recognised the seriousness of the threat much earlier. In security policy, two wasted years can have consequences that last for decades. My Kyiv Post articles from October 2024: kyivpost.com/opinion/40642 kyivpost.com/opinion/40916 @ZelenskyyUa @Billbrowder @elinavaltonen @Tsahkna @kajakallas @vonderleyen @magnusbrunner @alexstubb

The International Security Institute, which I lead, is preparing a proposal to sanction individuals in Serbia who are responsible for laundering money for Russian companies and who play a significant role in Russia’s hybrid warfare activities in Serbia. We are grateful to our friends at @USTreasury and @eu_eeas for their cooperation.

I am not going to pretend to be modest. Everyone enjoys moments like this, especially when you make a judgement in public while almost every official statement points in the opposite direction, and events eventually prove you right. Back in June, when Serbia’s Minister of Mining and Energy, Dubravka Đedović Handanović, and MOL representatives were saying that the outstanding issues had effectively been settled and that the deal was approaching its final stage, I wrote something very simple: Hungary’s MOL would not acquire the Serbian-Russian oil company NIS. No caveats. No “perhaps”. No “we shall see”. No wording that could later be adjusted to fit the outcome. I wrote that the deal would not happen. Even afterwards, everything being said publicly pointed the other way. MOL continued to say that its talks with Gazprom were progressing well and had reached the final stage. Today, Forbes Serbia reports that negotiations between MOL and Gazprom have effectively collapsed and that the Russian side does not want to sell its stake to MOL. So this is not hindsight. Hindsight is the cheapest commodity in public life. I made that judgement in advance, publicly and without ambiguity, at a time when almost everything in the public domain suggested precisely the opposite. I will not, of course, discuss the sources or the information on which I based it. But information is ultimately worth only as much as its accuracy. And in this case, the outcome is fairly clear. Fortunately, X keeps the timestamps. Even better when time confirms what you wrote while others were telling the public that the deal was all but done.

The official US position from @StateDept is that the United States respects today’s Hague judgment against Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi. President Trump’s Special Envoy @RichardGrenell calls the judgment “outrageous” and the three judges and the American prosecutor “left wing loons”. So what exactly is the official US position on this judgment? And who exactly is the “deep state” here? @RichardGrenell or @StateDept?

More than two weeks ago I wrote for Italy’s @Libero_official about why the European right keeps growing and why @GiorgiaMeloni , @MLP_officiel and the @AfD can no longer be dismissed as political forces on the margins. I argued that Europe had not simply become more “radical”. The real problem is that the traditional political centre is losing the trust of voters because it has failed to deal convincingly with the issues people actually live with every day: economic insecurity, energy, industry, migration, security and, ultimately, whether the state is still capable of doing what people expect it to do. Today, Saxony-Anhalt gave us an extraordinary result. The AfD won around 44% of the vote. In 2021 it had 20.8%. The CDU, which won 37.1% five years ago, is now down to around 18%. The SPD and Die Linke are at around 9%, the Greens at roughly 8.6%, while BSW is fighting to stay above the 5% threshold. The AfD may still be kept out of government. It may not have an absolute majority, and the other parties may find some arrangement to prevent it from taking power. But look at what has actually happened. The AfD has won more votes than the CDU, SPD and Greens combined. You can keep a party out of government through parliamentary arithmetic. You cannot make 44% of the electorate disappear. This is exactly the problem I wrote about in @Libero_official . Europe’s political centre should spend less time wondering how to isolate the parties benefiting from this change and much more time asking why millions of its own former voters no longer want to vote for it. Saxony-Anhalt has just made that question impossible to ignore.

Cara Presidente @GiorgiaMeloni, desidero farLe le mie più sincere congratulazioni per aver portato il Suo governo a diventare il più longevo nella storia della Repubblica italiana. In un Paese nel quale la stabilità politica è stata troppo spesso un’eccezione, questo risultato ha un significato che va ben oltre un semplice record di durata. In questi anni ha dimostrato che una leadership forte può essere chiaramente politica e, allo stesso tempo, responsabile nel governo del Paese, capace di difendere con fermezza gli interessi nazionali e di rafforzare il ruolo dell’Italia in Europa e nel mondo. È una qualità che ho sempre apprezzato nel Suo modo di governare. Le auguro di continuare con la stessa determinazione. L’Italia ha ancora molte sfide davanti a sé, ma oggi è un Paese più stabile, più ascoltato e più consapevole del proprio peso. Una parte importante di questo risultato porta la Sua firma. Con sincera stima, Orhan Dragaš @FratellidItalia

Ms @MartaKosEU has no problem warmly raising a glass and drinking rakija with the Chetnik vojvoda @AndrijaMandicDF , who, in his own name and on behalf of his party, offered condolences and mourned a war criminal, but she does have a problem with the fact that the Serbian authorities did not ban the “glorification” of Ratko Mladić?

In the digital world, facts no longer enjoy a natural advantage over interpretation, because between an event and its audience stand systems that decide what will be seen, in what order and how often. The struggle for power today is therefore less about who possesses information and increasingly about who decides what people will see, hear and ultimately consider important.

Serbia today is divided between those who mourn him and those who wish he had suffered longer. A war criminal.

I hope Serbia will spare @FukuyamaFrancis the need to revisit this thesis as often as history has made him revisit the argument in his famous book The End of History and the Last Man.

“I fatti possono restare esattamente gli stessi. Cambia la percezione e cambiano i giudizi, le scelte e perfino ciò che siamo disposti a riconoscere come vero.”