Kosovo – independence in the new geopolitical era

Pristina, Kosovo’s compact and congested capital, is vibrant in the winter, a smoky maze of bars, coffee shops, marketplaces, and mosques. Down its back streets and alleyways, memories of the war live on. Banners venerate former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a paramilitary group that fought guerilla-style against Serb units, and stickers, stuck to lampposts and shopfronts, urge consumers to Bojkoto Produktet Serbe.

In many ways, it is a miracle that Kosovo exists at all. In 2008, this small Muslim Albanian nation, locked in the heart of the Balkans, split unilaterally from Serbia, one of five successor states to Tito’s Yugoslavia. But the Serbs, backed by Russia and China, refused to recognise its independence. A decade earlier, Belgrade had waged a bloody ground war against Kosovar separatism – until NATO intervened and bombed Serb forces, then led by the genocidal strongman Slobodan Milošević, into submission.

In the years since, the West has acted as the gatekeeper of Kosovo’s sovereignty, its first and last line of defence. Yet integration into the Euro-Atlantic bloc – NATO and the EU – has been slow. Kosovo and Serbia aren’t at war any more, but they aren’t at peace, either: the border between the two countries remains contested. Meanwhile, Belgrade, still reeling from its humiliation at the hands of the Anglo-American military, has drifted ever-deeper into Moscow’s reimagined Russkiy Mir.

The closeness of the current Serb president Alexandar Vucic to Vladimir Putin raises anxiety rates in Pristina. “The question is whether [he, Vucic] can refuse a phone call from Putin,” one senior Kosovar official told me. “It is of great importance that Kosova becomes a member of NATO.” (‘Kosova’ is the Albanian word for the Serbian term ‘Kosovo’: 90 per cent of people in Kosovo speak Albanian, identify as Albanian, and practice a moderate form of Islam common in Albania; five per cent are Orthodox Serb.)

There was an election here on 28 December. Domestically, Kosovo’s politics are a mess. In the months leading up to the vote, parliament was divided and the incumbent prime minister, Albin Kurti, couldn’t form a government. Kurti campaigned on a pledge to end the impasse in Kosovo’s political life. On 29 December, he was re-elected by an increased margin. “The people of Kosovo, and the Republic, have won,” he said.

Kurti himself is a mercurial figure. In the late 1990s, as a student activist, he was jailed by Serb police for “jeopardising the territorial integrity” of the rump Yugoslavia. Released in 2001, he returned to Pristina where he co-founded Vetëvendosje, a left-wing political party dedicated to securing a referendum on Kosovo’s independence. By 2017, Vetëvendosje, which means ‘self-determination’, was the largest party in Kosovo, and Kurti, bright, shrewd, and ambitious, its most popular politician. By 2020, he was prime minister.

From his government base in Pristina, a tall, grey, vault-like building in the centre of the city, Kurti projects himself as a dynamic player on the international stage, a keen solver of European problems. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, he was quick to send military aid – armoured cars, trucks, and mortar shells – to Kyiv. Last year, he offered to set Kosovo up as a ‘return hub’ for British asylum deportees. “We want to help the UK,” he remarked after meeting Keir Starmer in London in October. “We have limited capacity, but still we want to help.”

Adelina Hasani is a researcher at the Kosovar Centre for Security Studies (KCSS), a think-tank in downtown Pristina. She told me that Kurti’s goal was to maximise Kosovo’s diplomatic leverage by any means necessary. “We don’t have that many resources and our economy is not that sustainable,” Hasani said. “So we are going to offer anything that we can.”

Kosovo may not be rich – its per capita income is five times lower than the European average – but this is not a country that wears its institutional loyalties lightly. On the outskirts of Pristina, on the bus in from Skopje, I passed a scaled-down Statue of Liberty perched on top of a hotel called Victory. The National Library of Kosovo hosts a NATO reading room: ‘access by appointment only.’ On the south side of the city stands Bill Clinton Boulevard, marked by a grinning brass bust of the disgraced ex-president.

The break-up of Yugoslavia was a brutal affair. As Tito’s socialist system disintegrated in the 1980s, Serbia sought to dominate the old Yugoslav state. Belgrade attacked Slovenia, the first of the breakaway Balkan republics, in 1991. Then Croatia. Then Bosnia and Herzegovina. The war for Kosovo’s independence escalated in the early months of 1998 and peaked in the spring of 1999, as NATO jets, dispatched by Clinton, screamed across Serbian skies.

By that point, 800,000 Kosovars, half the population of the country, had fled or been forced into exile. Another 8,000, including hundreds of KLA fighters, had been killed in the crossfire. In 2006, Milošević, the chief standard bearer for Serbian nationalism, died of a heart attack while on trial for genocide at The Hague. But the belief that Kosovo is, or should be, sovereign Serb territory did not die with him. “We will recognise neither the factual or de jure independence of Kosovo,” Vucic stated in 2023. “There is no surrender.”

Vucic was elected president of Serbia in 2017. He served as ‘minister of information’ in the Milošević regime during the war. The EU launched a normalisation process – the Brussels Agreement; now stalled – in 2013 and border tensions cooled slightly in the 2010s. Since then, relations between Kosovo and Serbia have soured again.

In September 2023, militants fired on a Kosovar police patrol in Banjska, a small Serb town north of Pristina. Twelve months later, the Ibar-Lepenac canal, a core piece of Kosovar infrastructure, was sabotaged. According to Hasani, Moscow has been amplifying its disinformation efforts in Kosovo for a while. “The Russians study us and try to understand what the most fragile part of our society is,” she said. “Then they focus on that.”

Kurti is desperate to fortify his young country against such threats. Recently, he has purchased anti-tank weaponry from Germany and drones from the US. But proximity to the West comes at a cost. Kosovo doesn’t really have a foreign policy of its own. Instead, it tracks the trajectory of American power.

Five years ago, in exchange for Israeli recognition of Kosovo’s sovereignty, Pristina opened an embassy in Jerusalem, making it the first Muslim-majority state to do so. And since 7 October 2023, Kurti’s criticisms of Israel have been muted, at best. Kosovar officials have called for an end to what they euphemistically refer to as the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, but they refuse to characterise Israel’s actions against the Palestinians as genocide or ethnic cleansing. On Gaza, “we have kept a policy in coordination with the US and the EU,” Jeton Zulfaj, one of Kurti’s top political aides, told me. “Where we are, as a country, allied and aligned.”

This is jarring given Kosovo’s treatment at the hands of Belgrade. It also doesn’t make sense. NATO is fracturing. Europe is under siege. Donald Trump holds American alliances in contempt. Zulfaj seemed convinced that, despite Trump’s volatility, Washington would remain “a strategic partner and a friend”. But Hasani was less convinced: “For the first time, it feels like we don’t have a security guarantee from the US because of Trump.” There is a fear here in Pristina, just below the surface, that Kosovo, independent now for 18 years, lives at the mercy of global events.