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As the United States and Europe condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, Sasa Bozic responded by opening the Putin Caf\u00e9 in the Bosnian city of Banja Luka, decorating it with a mannequin of the Russian president \u2014 a foot taller than Vladimir V. Putin is in real life.<\/p>\n
Today, with much of Europe horrified at President Trump\u2019s attack on President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine<\/a> in the Oval Office, Mr. Bozic has a new project: a motel and restaurant complex called \u201cTrump and Putin\u2019s Place.\u201d He plans to open it this summer.<\/p>\n Paying tribute to Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, Mr. Bozic said, is not political \u2014 just \u201ca \u201cmarketing trick\u201d that works in Banja Luka. Since the 1989 collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, many in the mostly ethnic Serb city and surrounding region have looked favorably on Russia and with hostility on an American-led order in Europe that Mr. Trump appears intent on upending.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A Biden Caf\u00e9, Mr. Bozic said, would never work, even less an eatery named after President Zelensky, but \u201ceveryone here likes Putin and Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Banja Luka is the capital of Republika Srpska, a Serb-controlled region of Bosnia and Herzegovina that was born from the ethnic cleansing of the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. That violence more than three decades ago punctured hopes that the demise of Communism would open a new era of prosperity and harmony. It gave an early foretaste of the appeal and destructive power of ethnonationalism, a force now resurgent around the world.<\/p>\n The Serb region has for decades felt out of step with \u2014 and victimized by \u2014 what it views as a hostile, American-dominated world order committed, at least in principle, to human rights, democracy and territorial integrity.<\/p>\n Many ethnic Serbs have regarded Russia, which shares their Orthodox Christian faith, as a protector against the West, which intervened militarily during the 1992-95 war to help Bosnia\u2019s Muslim populations and again in 1998 to break Serbia\u2019s grip on Kosovo.<\/p>\n Serbs inside Serbia and beyond its borders in Bosnia still harbor bitter memories of NATO bombings in the 1990s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Now many feel that things have changed with the return of President Trump.<\/p>\n \u201cTrump\u2019s America is different,\u201d said Mladen Ivanic, a former prime minister of Bosnia\u2019s Serb enclave. While opposed to the region\u2019s ethnonationalist leadership, he hopes the new administration in Washington will be more sympathetic to Serb concerns. But he also sees tumult ahead.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are now living in a new world where everything is possible, even conflict between America and Europe\u201d Mr. Ivanic said. \u201cI never thought that was possible.\u201d He added that he believed that \u201cTrump has no interest in the Balkans,\u201d but his demolition of longstanding assumptions about what the United States stands for have \u201cchanged everything.\u201d<\/p>\n The change has dismayed former Communist countries that, thankful for Washington\u2019s hostility to Moscow during the Cold War, count themselves as loyal American allies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Vytautas Landsbergis, a former leader of Lithuania who led his Baltic nation, then still a Soviet republic, to declare independence in 1990, described Mr. Trump\u2019s confrontation with Mr. Zelensky as a crude betrayal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThey invited a guest, beat him up, spat on him, and threw him out the door,\u201d Mr. Landsbergis said. \u201cWhat happened in Washington is an extremely low level\u201d that \u201chas never been seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n Lech Walesa, the former Solidarity trade union leader in Poland and a global symbol of resistance to tyranny, on Monday joined former political prisoners to send a letter to President Trump<\/a> voicing \u201chorror and disgust\u201d at his hectoring of President Zelensky<\/a>, saying it reminded them of their encounters with imperious Communist-era officials.<\/p>\n For those who see the United States as a bully rather than a liberator, the prospect of Washington turning its back on old verities has been met with glee.<\/p>\n Milorad Dodik, the Republika Srpska\u2019s embattled leader, has been fishing eagerly in the troubled waters stirred up by President Trump. He praised the Oval Office confrontation with Mr. Zelensky, who had been trying to correct Mr. Trump\u2019s depictions of the origins of the war in Ukraine, as a triumph for \u201ctruth\u201d over \u201cfairy tales.\u201d<\/p>\n Hoping that Washington will rally to his side against Bosnia\u2019s central government in Sarajevo, Mr. Dodik recently hosted a visit to Banja Luka by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor and Mr. Trump\u2019s former attorney. Mr. Giuliani arrived shortly before a Bosnian court convicted Mr. Dodik of flouting the rulings of an international official overseeing implementation of the 1995 Dayton peace agreement.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n That agreement, brokered by the Clinton administration, put an end to more than three years of ethnic conflict in Bosnia and has kept the peace since.<\/p>\n Mr. Dodik, who has long embraced Russia as his protector, is now looking to Washington for help. In a letter to Mr. Giuliani<\/a>, he wrote: \u201cYou and President Trump understand better than anyone the ruthless nature of the deep state and the lengths they go in attacking political opponents.\u201d<\/p>\n The visit did not go entirely as planned. Mr. Giuliani obligingly portrayed Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country from which Mr. Dodik has repeatedly threatened to secede, as a menacing hotbed of Islamic extremism and wore a MAGA-style hat with the words \u201cMake Srpska Great Again.\u201d But he inadvertently insulted his host by calling him a \u201cBosnian,\u201d a label that Mr. Dodik uses for Muslims.<\/p>\n A day after Mr. Giuliani attended a rally of Mr. Dodik\u2019s ethnic Serb supporters, the enclave\u2019s leader was sentenced in absentia last week by the Sarajevo court to a year in prison and barred from holding public office for six years. He says he does not recognize the court\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n