Still sparks between Serbia and Kosovo. Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, after the tensions caused by the arrest of three Kosovar policemen by the Serbian security forces, accused the Kosovar premier Albin Kurti of doing nothing to calm the situation but – on the contrary – of increasingly exacerbating the events and seek war at any cost.
“I fear that we have crossed the Rubicon and that it will be very difficult to return to normality,” Vucic said in the evening on RTS public TV. For the president, the situation is at a crossroads – either we work for peace or we go in the opposite direction.
It is important to say this, he noted, to avoid any kind of speculation. There is a man in the Balkans, Albin Kurti, who wants to provoke a war – Vucic said, confirming that the arrest of the three fully armed Kosovar policemen took place well inside Serbian territory, 1.8 km from the administrative line of demarcation, as Belgrade defines the border with Kosovo. This version is the opposite of the one provided by pristina, which speaks of the “kidnapping” of the three agents in the territory of Kosovo.
Vucic: Kurti dreams of being the new Zelensky
According to President Vucic, Kosovar Prime Minister Kurti dreams of being the new Zelensky. «He wants to have a war biography. But we will not allow it”, Vucic said, accusing Kurti and the entire leadership of Pristina of aiming to “expel the Serb population forever from northern Kosovo”. Since the beginning of the year, he noted, there have been 600 cases of shooting against (Kosovo) Serbs, none against (Kosovo) Albanians. “The crisis begins when someone decides to go to illegitimate elections”, he added with reference to the local vote of last April 23 in northern Kosovo, boycotted by the Serbs and which for this reason saw the election of new mayors of Albanian ethnicity for the four major municipalities in the north with a Serbian majority.
“These mayors must resign, the Kosovar police force must be withdrawn from the north, people live in fear, but Kurti does not intend to do any of this,” the president said in his speech on public TV Rts. Emphasizing that Serbia bears no responsibility for the escalation of tension in northern Kosovo, Vucic said that not a single Serbian policeman or soldier crossed the border (administrative line) when three Kosovar policemen were arrested today.