Tall and handsome, sporting a sharp denim jacket and a razor thin-beard, Marko Milacić is not what I was expecting the dyed-in-the-wool anti-NATO activist to look like. Marko is leading the charge in the struggle to keep Montenegro a neutral country. As director of the NGO, Movement for Neutrality Montenegro, he has been the target of special treatment by corrupt Montenegrin authorities. Police harassment, government surveillance, and ominous threats are just some of the repressive tactics that the local regime has turned to in an effort to silence him.

Last year Marko was arrested and detained before he could enter a public event held in support of NATO. His detainment drew the ire of prominent intellectuals, but it attracted almost no attention in the foreign press. His maltreatment at the hands of corrupt officials has fueled further anti-NATO resentment in a country that remains deeply divided over the question of NATO membership.

Many Montenegrins look upon the alliance with deep-rooted suspicion because of the bombing campaign it led in the former Yugoslavia in 1999. It was the first time that NATO launched a military campaign without UN Security Council approval. The U.S. and its European allies deemed the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Kosovo sufficient to warrant an intervention — Russia and China disagreed — NATO moved forward with Operation Allied Force anyways. NATO’s air campaign was mostly directed in what is now Serbia and Kosovo, but it resulted in the death of six civilians, including three children, in Montenegro’s northeast. NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg apologized for the incident last June.

Opposition figures mark the anniversary of their deaths every year with a march and a small rally as part of their campaign against becoming a member of the alliance. One person I spoke with likened their activities to, “building a campaign on the corpses of those who were bombed.” Clearly the issue remains deeply divisive. Like Marko, some of the opposition figures who organize these marches have been subjected to maltreatment by the Montenegrin authorities. In January a member of the opposition showed me pictures of scars and bruises that he claims came after a savage beating he received for his views.

Marko’s organization stages a mock ISIS execution in front of the Ministry of Defense. The purpose was to draw attention to the possibility that joining NATO will make Montenegro a target of terrorist attacks. — Podgorica, Montenegro

But strong-arm tactics aimed at disrupting anti-NATO agitators haven’t proven useful when it comes to winning over Montenegrins divided on the issue. For them, repression only provides further evidence that the regime — under the questionable leadership of Prime Minister Milos Djukanović — is willing to turn to desperate measures in order to safeguard its NATO ambitions. By far the most effective means of silencing Marko and other NATO detractors, has been casting them off as being either pro-Russian or pro-Serbian or both.

Dr. Savo Kentera is president of the local of the the Atlantic Council in Podgorica. The Atlantic Council is an influential NGO based in Washington D.C. that supports trans-Atlantic integration. Kentera doesn’t mince words when he brushes off Marko as a Russian stooge. He says it’s “not a secret,” that Russia is influencing NGO’s that hold anti-NATO views. According to Kentera, “Some are more visible than others and some are not, but they definitely have a lot of them.” While he struggled to name the specific groups in question, he was sure to point to Marko’s Movement for Neutrality as an example of NGO being heavily influenced by Russia.

“Based on everything that they are doing, and how they are talking, you have to be really stupid in order not to realize who is behind them.” I asked him if there was any evidence to support these claims: “When you say evidence, what kind of evidence are you asking for? If you are you asking for evidence that the Russians are paying them, then you’re not going to find that because they are not so stupid.”

This is a charge Marko categorically denies. He says he receives no financial support from Moscow and dismisses these allegations as an attempt to delegitimize those who are against NATO membership. To-date no evidence that I am aware of has surfaced that has connected Marko to any outside influence. Indeed, despite Marko’s objections to joining NATO, his organization continues to support Montenegro’s further integration into the European Union. Marko calls this path ‘Irelandization’ to denote how a country can become integrated into the European Union without joining NATO. This is a position that a majority of Montenegrins share — as many as 60% according to recent polls.

The key question here is not whether Irelandization is a practical strategy for Montenegro, but why ‘Western security experts’ widely recognize that the domestic populations in places like Ireland, Finland and Sweden have a right to have a say in their foreign policy — often by popular referendum— while they don’t even bat an eye when Montenegro is invited into the alliance in spite of widespread popular disapproval.

Ultimately this strategy could backfire. An unclassified U.S. diplomatic memo from 2007 concluded that anti-NATO protests are directed as much at the oppressive regime in Podgorica than against the ‘West.’ According to the cable: “THE OPPOSITION ATTACKS ARE NOT MOTIVATED BY ANTIPATHY TO NATO AS MUCH AS ENMITY TOWARDS THE GOVERNMENT.” As the opposition comes to see NATO as an actor supporting Djukanović’s illiberal regime, opposition to the alliance and the ‘West’ more generally will no doubt grow.

Regardless, Marko’s pleas for being taken off the media’s ‘black list’ reserved for Putin apologists have fallen on deaf ears. By suggesting the father and husband is a loyal proprietor of Russian propaganda — a stooge doing Putin’s bidding — his credibility suffers an irredeemable blow in the eyes of Western media. This is why you will never read a quote from Marko in the New York Times or the Washington Post, even though his views are widely shared by many Montenegrins. This raises serious questions about the media’s capacity to report objectively on events in the ‘Crush Zone’ during a time of heightened geopolitical rivalry.

In the ‘Crush Zone’ there is a thin line between propaganda and public diplomacy. In Montenegro, this line is often decided based on your political leanings rather than any objective measure. If the message is in support NATO, it is public diplomacy. If not, it is treated as Russian propaganda.

Local elites play this polarization to their advantage by casting everyone in the opposition as Russian agitators. They use this tactic to justify the excessive use of force when they put down the opposition’s protests and when they suggest that some things should simply not be subjected to democratic approval for fear of Russian influence — NATO membership included. That this opposition is made up of a wide-range of actors who hold very divergent views makes no difference to foreign observers once they’ve been deemed ‘untrustworthy Serbs’ or Putin propagandists.

It might be true that some NGO’s are receiving some kind of assistance from abroad, or are somehow being unduly influenced by Russia — indeed some I spoke with openly admit to wanting closer relations with Moscow— but the fact is, that exaggerated claims about this influence are disproportionate to the evidence at hand. That much media reporting and most ‘security experts’ are so easily writing off the concerns held by a majority of Montenegrins based off of what amounts to mostly unsubstantiated claims seems brash and more than a little short-sighted. Inviting a country, no matter how small it is, into a military alliance that functions on the basis of consensus, without the popular support of its people can easily turn out to be a recipe for future antagonisms.