The envoy of the European Union for the Kosovo-Serbia dialogue, Miroslav Lajcak, has made a weekly summary of his agenda.

He writes about Thursday’s meetings in Brussels, where the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti and the President of Serbia, Aleksandër Vučić held with the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the French President Emmanuel Macron, the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the President of the European Council Charles Michel and the head of European diplomacy Josep Borrell.

In a post on the social network, on Facebook, Lajçak writes that he welcomes the readiness shown by Kurti and Vucic for the implementation of the agreement, although they failed to agree on the modalities.

Full post:

On the sidelines of the European Council, French President Macron, German Chancellor Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Meloni together with European Council President Michel and High Representative Borrell and I organized meetings in support of the EU – facilitating dialogue with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti.

The idea was simple – to continue our discussions last weekend during our joint mission in Pristina and Belgrade and advance the implementation of the agreement on the road to normalization.

What were planned to be short meetings with European leaders turned into lengthy separate negotiations with President Vučić and Prime Minister Kurti after the European leaders had to leave for the Council.

I welcome that both leaders showed willingness to implement the agreement, although they failed to agree on modalities. They had comments and questions about the European proposal for the statute for the establishment of the association of municipalities with a Serbian majority in Kosovo, which we presented to them during our joint mission last Saturday.

I hope we will be able to clarify the outstanding questions and concerns in the coming weeks.

Our statute proposes a modern European way to deal with the sensitive issue of minority protection in accordance with the best European practices and standards and does not cross the “red borders” of the parties as previously defined. But this is not the only element that needs implementation.

Serbia also has many outstanding obligations from the agreement and we need to see that implementation progresses in parallel, so that both Kosovo and Serbia get what they agreed to.

The focus now must be on advancing the implementation of the agreement without preconditions or delays. As the three European leaders clearly stated, formalities should not hinder this important process. With this in mind, I will soon invite the chief negotiators to Brussels to discuss the next steps.

/k.s/