Serbia is preparing to give Rio Tinto the green light to develop Europe’s largest lithium mine two years after Belgrade called off the project, paving the way for a significant boost for the continent’s electric vehicle industry. President Aleksandar Vučić said that “new guarantees” from the Anglo-Australian miner and EU looked set to address Serbia’s concerns over whether necessary environmental standards would be met at the Jadar site in the west of the country.
Belgrade has also locked horns with the EU over the status of its former province Kosovo, and is one of only two European countries not to impose sanctions on Russia over Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. EU officials “thought that we were going to give to the Chinese”, Vučić said. “We did not intend to do that because we promised we were going to deal with the EU.