Vucic and Kurti in Brussels: What are Serbia and Kosovo arguing about?

The EU Commission wants an agreement in the Kosovo conflict. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Kurti and Serbia’s President Vucic have been invited to Brussels for this purpose. What are the issues at stake and how deadlocked is the situation?

Why this meeting now?

The EU and the US do not want any more negotiations. You have set a deadline for the rival heads of government, Albin Kurti and Aleksandar Vucic. By March, they are supposed to accept the EU plan for normalizing relations between Kosovo and Serbia, drawn up by Germany and France. The director of the Belgrade institute for territorial economic development InTER, Dragisa Mijacic, can understand this pressure.

“The West wants to solve the Kosovo problem this year, because next year the EU Parliament and the US President will be elected. If you wait and see, the problem will drag on into 2026, and then it could war in northern Kosovo,” says Mijacic.

What does the EU proposal envisage for Kosovo?

Kosovar and Serbian media have published the outline of the plan. Accordingly, there are ten points that should lead to Kosovo and Serbia establishing normal neighborly relations. This includes, for example, that both states accept the respective national symbols of the other, such as passports, diplomas, car number plates or customs stamps. Serbia should not block Kosovo’s accession to international organizations.

In addition, both sides are to work together on the EU accession process. Serbia has been in EU accession negotiations since 2014. Kosovo submitted an application for membership in December 2022, which received very negative comments from Serbia. The EU also calls for cooperation in various areas, such as business, science, justice, culture and sport.

How does Serbia feel about the proposal?

Serbian President Vucic is seen by many EU politicians as manipulative and unreliable. He has been maneuvering between the EU and Russia for years. And even in the Kosovo conflict, it’s never exactly clear what Vucic intends to do next. In the Serbian parliament, where he has the nationalists breathing down his neck, he recently said that the EU proposal was unacceptable on a number of points.

In his appearances on Serbian television, he again sounded as if he wanted to prepare his people for the fact that he will come to an agreement with Kosovo. “We have to protect the peace and make compromises. The EU threatens to withdraw its investments from Serbia if we don’t do that. Serbia faces difficult days, but we will not give up our country,” said Vucic a few days before the meeting in Brussels .

When he says “our country,” Vucic primarily means Kosovo itself. The president doesn’t want to accept Kosovo as a state that is independent of Serbia. However, this is not required of him in the EU proposal. Vucic is only supposed to establish normal diplomatic relations with Kosovo and deal with the country being governed independently.

How does Kosovo feel about the proposal?

Kosovo’s Prime Minister Kurti told press representatives that he was satisfied with nine out of ten points of the proposal. He only has a problem with the tenth point, with the demand that all agreements previously negotiated in Brussels are to be implemented.

That would also mean that the ten Serbian communities in Kosovo would be allowed to set up a community association. Kurti, however, started as prime minister with a promise not to allow that. He fears a Serbian blockade and secession policy and has repeatedly drawn comparisons with Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serbian entity Republika Srpska.

“Our constitutional court has rejected a mono-ethnic Serbian administrative unit in Kosovo. The plan is for it to be controlled monopolistically by the Serbian List party, which is controlled from Belgrade,” said Kurti.

How likely is an early agreement?

That is hard to say. Serbian President Vucic insists on establishing the Kosovar-Serbian municipal administration. He negotiated them himself with Kurti’s previous government, which had a different opinion, and describes them as necessary so that the Serbs in Kosovo are protected and can assert their interests against the Albanian-dominated central government in Pristina.

Vucic has the EU and the US behind him on this point. In this respect, Vucic has no immediate reason not to agree to the EU plan. However, it is unclear to Vucic how he really feels about the plan because he keeps making different statements.

Kurti, on the other hand, is clearly in a dilemma, and how he’ll handle it is unclear. If he wants to stay true to himself, then he can’t actually agree to the EU proposal. Some experts in Kosovo are speculating that Kurti could hold a referendum on Serbian local government to let the majority Albanian citizens decide whether to swallow the toad in order to take a step further towards EU accession.