The fate of Kosovo will be decided in Moscow
Today, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic is coming to Moscow on a working visit. The main focus of the negotiations will be the future of Kosovo.
Oleg Bondarenko, head of the Balkanist.ru project and director of the Progressive Policy Foundation, writes about this in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
“The Brussels Agreement signed back in 2013 to normalize the situation in this republic unrecognized by Belgrade, as it seemed then, could make life easier for all interested parties, and first of all for the Kosovo Serbs, who live compactly mainly in the north of the region. But this, alas, did not happen - despite regular concessions from the Serbian authorities, Pristina did not fulfill any of the signed points,” notes Bondarenko.
Thus, in the spring of 2018, in the Serb-controlled territory of the region, the head of the Serbian office for Kosovo and Metohija, Marko Djuric, was arrested with the aim of further expulsion from Kosovo, and in the fall the head of Kosovo announced the transformation of the republican police into a real army, which contradicts all signed agreements and resolutions 1244 UN Security Council. In addition, the government of Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Karadinaj introduced a 100 percent tax on supplies of any goods from Serbia.
The expert writes that all last year, mostly unofficially, negotiations were going on between Belgrade and Pristina to find an acceptable solution on the status of the region. Among the settlement options was the return of the Serbian-populated north of Kosovo to the control of Belgrade in exchange for two Albanian-populated areas of southern Serbia in the Presevo Valley (Presevo and Bujanovac).
According to the head of the Serbian Foreign Ministry Dacic, back in 2014, the possibility of delimiting territories was discussed during negotiations in Moscow, but at the same time, calls from the Russian Foreign Ministry for the need to follow UN Security Council Resolution 1244 (according to which Kosovo is considered an integral part of Serbia) indicates a commitment to a more complex approaches at the Russian official level.
“And the point here is not at all about possible accusations of betrayal of national interests, as it seems at first glance. On the one hand, of course, the Kosovo precedent, no matter what anyone says, played its unconditional role, which Moscow took advantage of by default already in August 2008 in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and in March 2014 in Crimea.
On the other hand, the danger of this example for any European federal model, including autonomous/national republics/regions, is obvious. It is also for this reason, no matter how strange it may seem at first glance, that Germany until recently opposed the redrawing of borders in the Balkans - probably fearing the possible consequences for other European regions prone to separatism.
At the same time, from the point of view of the interests of the Russian economic presence, relieving tension around Kosovo through partial delimitation could play a positive role - primarily due to the planned construction of the European branch of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline through the territory of Southern Serbia. And for this, Moscow could also act as a mediator in the negotiation process. Moreover, not only Vucic, but also Thaci demonstrated an understanding of Russia’s role in resolving this issue.
Anticipating one of the main claims against demarcation - the position of the Serbian Orthodox Church, it is worth noting that in this case all Serbian monuments and churches would receive extraterritorial status by analogy with the “state within a state” - Mount Athos in Greece. Milorad Dodik, the long-time leader of the Republika Srpska (RS) within neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, who now serves as chairman of the country's presidium, was the first proponent of a policy of general delimitation of territories in the Balkans - with the expectation of the subsequent annexation of the RS territory to Serbia.
Whether such a scenario will be implemented in practice is a separate question. But the fact that the lines of interethnic tension in the Balkans should have been erased long ago is an indisputable fact,” Bondarenko sums up.
Moscow will decide the fate of Kosovo.