Kosovo-Serbia conflict creates fear of escalation in tense Europe

A growing conflict between Kosovo and Serbia is threatening to become a major crisis for the U.S. and Western leaders who are already responding to the largest land war in Europe since World War II.

With a war raging in Ukraine, Washington is trying to deftly navigate a series of violent clashes and boiling tensions in the independent state of Kosovo, which remain unresolved more than a month after the conflict erupted.

Last week, the standoff grew worse after neighboring Serbia, which placed its combat forces on high alert, arrested three Kosovan police officers and ignored international calls to release them. Kosovo responded to the arrest by closing its borders with Serbia.

Meanwhile, the heads of both countries are refusing to negotiate with each other, setting off an emergency in the western Balkans at the worst time possible for Western leaders.

Jorn Fleck, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, said the conflict could grow worse, even as he is cautiously optimistic it could be resolved diplomatically.

“No one in Washington, Brussels, Paris, Berlin, needs another source of major insecurity or conflict in Europe,” Fleck said. “There is real concern about the situation.”

Some analysts are also worried that Russia, which has never recognized the independence of Kosovo and maintains historically close ties to Serbia, could use the crisis to spread more disinformation.

Moscow, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, has repeatedly accused NATO of committing atrocities after intervening in a deadly war between Kosovo and Serbia decades ago.

Amid the current tensions, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last month called the situation “alarming” and pinned the blame on the West.

“A major explosive situation is brewing in the heart of Europe,” Lavrov said, according to Russian state-run media outlet TASS. “The West has embarked on a course of total subjugation of all those who in any way express their own opinion.”

The Kosovo-Serbia crisis has roots in November of last year, when Serbian elected officials resigned from public institutions en masse to protest a ban on Serbian-issued license plates.

Last year, Kosovo implemented a ban on Serbian-issued license plates for certain Kosovan cities, penalizing Serbs unless they instead used a license plate issued by Pristina. An agreement was reached in late November in which Serbia would not issue car license plates for Kosovo cities and Pristina would stop re-registering vehicles, but a wider agreement on the issue and to normalize ties was not provisionally agreed upon until February.

A European Union-brokered agreement to normalize ties and resolve issues was provisionally agreed upon in February; then, Serbs boycotted local elections in March.

That led to ethnic Albanian mayors taking office in four Serb-dominated municipalities in the north. The candidates won the elections with voter turnout of less than 4 percent.

The elections led to violent clashes between Serbs and police. NATO troops, authorized to maintain security through a United Nations resolution, intervened by sending in hundreds of troops to keep the peace.

The forces are holding down the violence but have done little to defuse tensions.

Serbia arrested three Kosovan police officers last week, though it’s unclear if they were taken deep inside Serbia, as Belgrade claimed, or within Kosovo, as Pristina claims.

The U.S. has called for their immediate release, but Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has simply ignored those pleas.

On Monday, President Biden expanded an existing emergency declaration in the western Balkans, expressing concern about “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” in the region.

European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Thursday he has called for emergency meetings with both Vučić and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, but that’s likely to be complicated by the fact both leaders are hesitant to negotiate in good faith.

Vučić said in a Thursday interview with a Serbian outlet that he would not meet with Kurti, arguing “there is no point in talking to him” and that Pristina’s goal was to expel Serbs from Kosovo.

Kurti said in an address this week he was against war and open to talking to the Serbian leader, but he also accused Belgrade of attempting to turn back the clock to when Kosovo was under Serbian control, before 2008.

“It seems the government in Belgrade is in search of a time machine,” he said. “The attack on and abduction of officers, the firing upon of [Kosovan] soldiers, the violence against journalists, will not be tolerated.”

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