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When Bosnia’s electoral authorities stripped Milorad Dodik of his post as president of the tiny Serb-majority statelet Republika Srpska, he did his best to appear unfazed. Instead, the divisive, genocide-denying nationalist laid down his own challenge to the institutions trying to topple him.

“What if I refuse?” he asked.

Bosnia may be about to find out.

Dodik, a key Balkan ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been in and around power in Bosnia since 2006, picking at the seams of the country’s patchwork multiethnic state. That state was birthed in 1995 by the Dayton Peace Accords, which halted the violence that spread across the former Yugoslavia as it crumbled in the 1990s, driven by then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s

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