Knežević Calls for an Uprising if Podgorica Accepts Croatia's EU Conditions, and Would Repay the Debt to Zagreb by Selling Kidneys

Milan Knežević has found a new opponent he says Montenegro must defend itself against - its own government. The pro-Russian and pro-Serbian MP in the Montenegrin parliament this week called for an "uprising" if Podgorica accepts the eight conditions Croatia has set in Montenegro's EU accession talks. The speech coincided with the European Council summit in Brussels, where the Croatian prime minister repeated that Montenegro must meet the conditions if it wants to finish negotiations by the end of the year.

"We will rise up if they do that. To defend the sovereignty of the state, to defend Prevlaka if needed, but this time we won't be defending Prevlaka from the Croats, but from the Government," said the leader of the Democratic People's Party. His list of "capitulations" is long: the ship "Jadran", 17 million euros in compensation, Prevlaka, property in the Bay of Kotor and renaming the "Zoran Džimi Gopčević" swimming pool.

Then came a proposal Balkan parliamentarism will long remember. Croatia is demanding 2.7 billion euros for military property from the succession of the former Yugoslavia - a figure mentioned last week by Croatian Foreign Minister Gordan Grlić Radman. Knežević "worked out" how to repay the debt: Montenegro has 520,000 inhabitants, a kidney on the black market costs 50,000 euros, so if everyone sells one, that's 2.6 billion, and for the rest the Kavač and Škaljari clans can lend 50 million euros each. "And let's join the European Union as one-kidney people, the entire population," he said.

The calculation doesn't even add up as a calculation. 520,000 kidneys at 50,000 euros is 26 billion, not 2.6 - ten times more than what the MP said from the podium. But the speech wasn't about maths.

It ended with a sentence that takes your breath away even by Balkan standards: "God willing, they'll put you all on that 'Jadran' and send you to Lora or blow you up." Lora is a former military base in Split, known for the camp where prisoners were abused and killed in the nineties. That is what he told the parliamentary majority of his own country.

Knežević is not a fringe figure. For years he was one of the leaders of the Democratic Front, which opposed Montenegro's entry into NATO and pushed for close ties with Serbia and Russia. He was among those charged over the 2016 election-day coup attempt, and was finally acquitted in February 2026. In July 2024 Croatia declared him persona non grata, together with Montenegrin parliament speaker Andrija Mandić and then deputy prime minister Aleksa Bečić - after parliament adopted a resolution on the genocide in Jasenovac, Dachau and Mauthausen.

It's easiest to write the speech off as folklore. But the conditions are real, and the Croatian prime minister made it clear in Brussels that without them there will be no end to the negotiations by the end of the year. So Montenegro stands between a neighbour demanding that the debts of the nineties be paid and an MP offering the whole nation on the black market. And Macedonia, which knows the road to Brussels by heart, can only ask: how many more Balkan countries will enter the Union with a bilateral list in hand?