The tit-for-tat followed the Serbian leader’s calls this week for new municipal elections in northern Kosovo to ease tensions that flared in 2023 when the Serbian community largely boycotted the ballot.
The local Serbs wanted to express dissatisfaction with Pristina, but the move backfired when ethnic Albanian candidates, representing just over 3 percent of the electorate, swept the elections. Despite the absence of a clear democratic mandate, Kurti, a leftist politician who entered politics as a student protestor, encouraged the men to take office and dispatched special police units to protect them, triggering a crisis that has inflamed passions on both sides of the border.
Since the dispute began, a policeman and three Serbian gunmen were killed in armed clashes in the northern part of the country last September. Additionally, dozens of NATO soldiers were injured during subsequent protests while trying to keep the two sides apart.
The Kosovo government has seized hundreds of weapons, including machine guns, mortars and anti-tank grenades found during police raids in the troubled areas.
Despite repeated attempts to defuse the conflict, the European Union has come up short. This week EU negotiators again tried to bring the parties together in Brussels for a so-called trilateral meeting with the bloc’s special envoy for dealing with the conflict, former Slovak Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajčák, but they refused.
On Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen invited Balkan leaders to a working lunch in Brussels to discuss the EU growth agenda and integrating the region into the European single market. Though Kurti and Vučić attended, they didn’t speak.
