Croatian President Zoran Milanović has slammed France for selling Zagreb secondhand fighter jets while providing its rival Serbia with a brand-new fleet.

“We look like fools,” he raged last week, “because the French sell new Rafales to the Serbs and used ones to us.”

Zagreb finalized a government-to-government deal with Paris in 2021 to modernize its air force by purchasing a dozen Rafale fighters valued at €999 million. The final aircraft, which were procured from France’s own stocks, were delivered last April, replacing Croatia’s outdated Soviet-era MiG-21 fleet.

In August 2024, Serbia signed a deal to buy 12 Rafale jets from French manufacturer Dassault Aviation fresh from the factory.

That transaction has enraged the Croatian president. Croatia fought Serbia in the 1990s in the bloody wars that followed Yugoslavia’s disintegration.

While relations between the two countries have improved dramatically since then, non-NATO Serbia’s close ties with Moscow are a worry to Zagreb, which joined the Atlantic alliance in 2009 and the EU in 2013.

Serbia’s own EU candidacy has largely stalled, with Belgrade ditching a Western Balkans summit in Brussels last month. Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos called on Serbia in November to “urgently reverse the backsliding on freedom of expression.”

French Europe Deputy Minister Benjamin Haddad, who was in Zagreb on Monday to discuss defense cooperation, defended the Serbia contract, saying Croatia should be pleased Belgrade was “gradually freeing itself from dependence on Russia and strengthening its ties with Western countries.”

But Milanović hit back that the deal was “implemented behind Croatia’s back and to the detriment of Croatia’s national interests,” and showed “that every country takes care of its own interests, including profits, first and foremost.”

The left-wing president added that the Croatian government, led by center-right Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, had erred by not confirming “whether France would sell the same or even more advanced aircraft models to one of our neighboring countries outside NATO.”

Domestic squabbles

Croatian officials are split over whether the president was right to react the way he did.

One Croatian diplomat told POLITICO that Milanović had a point and that France was wrong to sell the newer jets to Serbia after fobbing off Croatia with an older model.

But a second Croatian official said the deal was a good one for Zagreb and noted that the Croatian government had signed a letter of intent in December with Paris to upgrade its Rafale jets to the latest F4 standard.

“From France’s point of view, the signing of the letter of intent on December 8 in France by the minister [Catherine Vautrin] and her Croatian counterpart aims to support the partner in modernizing its Rafale fleet to the highest standard currently in service in France,” an official from the French armed forces ministry echoed. “The defense relationship with Croatia is dynamic and not set in stone in 2021.”

Croatia’s defense ministry said Milanović’s remarks “show elementary ignorance of how the international arms trade works.”

“Great powers — the United States of America, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, China — have been selling the same or similar weapons to countries that are in tense and even openly antagonistic relations for decades,” the ministry added. “The USA is simultaneously arming Israel and Egypt, Russia [is arming] India and Pakistan, while the West is simultaneously arming Greece and Turkey. This is the rule, not the exception.”

In Croatia, the president is also the commander-in-chief of the military but shares jurisdiction over defense policy with the government, which is responsible for the budget and the day-to-day management of the armed forces.

Milanović and Plenković are often at odds, a third Croatian official said, arguing the president was using the issue to hammer his political rival.

Dirt-cheap fighter jets

France has looked to strengthen defense ties with Croatia, which spends over 2 percent of its GDP on defense and is transitioning its Soviet-era military stocks to Western arms. Some of those purchases are coming from France.

Plenković was in Paris in December to sign a separate deal with KNDS France for 18 Caesar self-propelled howitzers and 15 Serval armored vehicles, with the equipment to be purchased with the EU’s loans-for-weapons SAFE money. 

In the original fighter jet deal, Croatia bought airplanes that were being used by the French air force, meaning they were cheaper than new stock and were available quickly. At the time the decision was criticized in Paris by parliamentarians arguing France was weakening its own air force to seal export contracts.

Serbia, meanwhile, reportedly paid €2.7 billion for the same number of jets, which are expected to be delivered as of 2028. China and Russia provide the vast majority of Belgrade’s weapons, with France a distant third.