Serbian DefMin attacks opposition presidential candidate

NEWS 07.02.202218:31
Ministarstvo odbrane

The Serbian authorities continued their attempts to discredit the opposition’s presidential candidate retired General Zdravko Ponos on Monday when Defense Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic said that the military was disarmed during his time as chief of general staff.

“The very clear facts show that the Army of Serbia was disarmed and devastated under Zdravko Ponos,” a Defense Ministry statement quoted Stefanovic as saying.
He added that “numerous attempts to alter history have been going on for days… trying to hide the clear facts”. The Defense Minister said that no one can convince others that Ponos and the former authorities armed and did not disarm the Serbian military. “Whatever (opposition leader) Dragan Djilas does, the facts and misdeeds that his candidate Zdravko Ponos left behind cannot be changed,” the minister and high-ranking Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) official said.

“The facts show that politician Ponos, who got to the rank of general thanks to politics and unprecedented leaps over all the ladders in the military, left the Army of Serbia devastated. He did not know his place or what his job was as a general, acting like a politician instead, and he does not know that now when he is a politician and trying to present himself as a general in order to grab power with his superior Djilas,” Stefanovic said.

Stefanovic’s statement claims that “the Serbian military had 700 main battle tanks, 90 helicopters, 850 armored vehicles, 140,000 pieces of infantry weapons, 1,800 AA defense guns and missile launchers in 2006 and just two years later had 220 tanks, 45 helicopters, 500 armored vehicles, 70,000 pieces of infantry weapons and 290 AA defense guns and missile launchers”.