Meeting in Brussels today, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti failed to reach any agreement on long-standing border and recognition issues that have intensified tensions between them in recent weeks. In late July, Kosovo’s attempt to ban the use of Serbian license plates and IDs of Serbs living in the northern part of Kosovo greatly inflamed the situation, which was only temporarily settled due to pressures from the EU and the NATO-led Kosovo Force International Mission (KFOR).
The two did agree to continue meeting in coming days, in hopes of reaching some agreement on normalizing relations, ABC News reported. Today’s meeting was mediated by the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy Josep Borrell and Miroslav Lajcak, EU Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue. Prior to the meeting, Borrell and Lajcak had said they expected the parties to be flexible enough to reach at least a preliminary agreement. Vucic was not optimistic, because, as he put it, the two sides disagreed on almost everything. However, he stated that he wants above all to “avoid any kind of possibility of escalation or conflict…. We need a rational approach … a compromise solution and not someone’s desire to find a new solution in which someone could blackmail Serbia or order Serbia how to behave,” he said, RT quoted him.
