GRANADA, Spain — Kosovo’s President Vjosa Osmani flatly refused to meet with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić at a summit on Thursday, instead calling for the EU to first sanction Vučić.
“There’s no reason to meet before sanctions are adopted towards Vučić. Sanctions first, and then we can talk about the rest,” Osmani told reporters ahead of a meeting of leaders for the European Political Community in Granada.
The European Political Community, created last year in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, aims to promote peace — and European Council President Charles Michel said it “should play an important role in diffusing conflicts” between Serbia and Kosovo as well as in the South Caucasus between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
But Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev cancelled his participation at the last minute. Meanwhile, no meeting is in sight between Kosovo and Serbia.
Tensions between the two flared up again recently in the Western Balkans when a group of heavily armed Serbs stormed a village in an ethnic Serbian-majority region of Kosovo on September 24. As a result, NATO is boosting its peacekeeping presence in northern Kosovo, and the United States called on Serbia to deescalate its military buildup on the border with Kosovo.
At the summit, Osmani called for sanctions on Serbia “for this horrendous act that it has committed — not just against Kosovo, but against peace, stability and security on the entire European continent,” adding that “supporting an aggressor for which there’s clear evidence from the 24th of September is not going to help peace and stability.”