EU seeks to defuse tension between Serbia and Kosovo in new round of dialogue in Brussels

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovar Prime Minister Albin Kurti on Thursday will be the protagonists of a new round of dialogue facilitated by the European Union to normalize their relations, which will be the first meeting at the highest level in more than a year and with the EU seeks to channel the tension recorded in late July with the border blockade in northern Kosovo.

The meeting, with the participation of the EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, is marked by the tension resulting from the Serbian community’s blocking of border crossings in protest against the application of a law – already postponed for a month – whereby people from Serbia entering Kosovo would have to hand over their identity documents, which would be replaced by others issued in Pristina.

The situation prompted the NATO mission in Kosovo to speak out, recalling its commitment to security in the area and stressing its readiness to intervene in the face of a possible spiral of violence.

The day before, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg met separately with Vucic and Kurti, to whom he called for responsibility to avoid tensions, recalling that its KFOR mission can be deployed to ensure stability in the area.

In separate press conferences at NATO, Kurti has attributed the blockades to Serbian organized gangs, “on one side there are police forces of a democratic state of Kosovo and on the other illegal structures of Serbia that are criminal gangs that erect barricades”, he has come to say, while Vucic has rejected Pristina’s accusations about its closeness to Russia and has defended “dialogue, negotiation, compromises and not blackmails against Serbia, about how it has to act or what it has to recognize”.

Earlier in June this year, Belgrade and Pristina reached an agreement for a ‘road map’ to solve problems in energy distribution in the north of the Serb-majority enclave. With this pact, the parties undertook to implement the energy agreements reached in 2013 and 2015, but which have only been partially implemented.

All in all, the EU-sponsored talks have gone through different phases without reaching any major agreement since they started more than a decade ago. During this period there have been periods of up to a year and a half without talks due to political uncertainty in the region.

The last face-to-face between Vucic and Kurti in Brussels dates back to June 2021, when the Kosovar leader traveled for the first time to the EU capital months after being elected prime minister. Then the meeting served to stage the resumption of the process, but did not produce concrete results. On that occasion, Borrell urged the parties to take advantage of the EU’s momentum with the Balkan region and called for a focus on generating results.

“We know that dialogue is not easy, but this process and sincere contact is necessary and is in the interests of the people of Kosovo and Serbia,” the head of diplomacy argued after a meeting that all sides acknowledged was not easy.

The EU perceives the dialogue between Belgrade and its former province not only as an unavoidable step to normalize relations after Kosovo’s 2008 independence, which several member states of the bloc, including Spain do not recognize, but to lay the foundations for the European path of both and to forge long-term political and economic stability in the entire Balkan region.

Kurti is considered more skeptical than previous leaders regarding rapprochement with Serbia and has shown little inclination to close a pact if it involves giving in to Belgrade. Likewise, Vucic has lost hope in the process and in statements before Thursday’s meeting he has already assured that he does not expect anything in particular from the meeting.