Is Sombor a city in the Republic of Croatia? No, that's not true: Sombor is a city located in the northwestern Bačka district of the Vojvodina province in Serbia, close to the Serbia-Hungary border. During its history, Sombor has been part of the Kingdom of Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, has belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy, the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia (Socialist Republic of Serbia), and Serbia.
The claim appeared in a TikTok video (archived here) on October 31, 2023. The text overlay (translated from Serbian to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
Sombor, Vojvodina (Croatia 🇭🇷)
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Nov 1 08:12:43 2023 UTC)
The dispute over the border in the Danube region between Croatia and Serbia is still unresolved. Serbia insists that the border is in the middle of the current course of the Danube, based on the argument that the Assembly of Vojvodina passed a law in 1945, which said that the border runs along the Danube River. Croatia believes that the former Yugoslavian republics' cadastral borders at the time of independence should become the current state borders. International law as well as the conclusions of the Badinter Commission support this position. In 2002, Croatia and Serbia, then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, signed the Protocol on Principles for Determining the Border, in which it was stated that the precise direction of the existing border would be determined and that cadastre and other relevant documentation would be taken into account.
Since 2014, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia has been warning Google with letters that it was "wrongly" drawing the border on the Danube, which Serbia and Croatia have not officially established. Namely, on Google satellite maps, the borders are indicated following what Croatia considers right - based on cadastral measurements from the time of Austria-Hungary.
