At May 4th summit in Berlin, Belgrade hosts pressure

Serbian President Aleksandar Vuciq will meet with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin on Wednesday. This will be Vuciqi's first meeting with the new German Chancellor.

According to Serbian media, Wolfgang Bichne, spokesman of the German government, confirmed that the meeting is scheduled for Wednesday at 17:30 in the German government building. Before meeting with Vuciqi, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will host Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti.

The German government has announced that on the same day Kosovo will be discussed. According to reports, Vuciq and Kurti will meet on Wednesday evening, in the presence of European Union Special Representative for the Belgrade-Pristina Dialogue Miroslav Lajcak, who will also come to Berlin at the invitation of the German Chancellor.

Wednesday's meeting will be the third meeting between Vuciqi and Kurti. The last meeting of the two officials was held in July last year in Brussels, but ended without any agreement. Ahead of his visit to Berlin and talks on Kosovo, Vuciq said he expects nothing well.

We are not talking, not by our will and our will, but with those who do not think to talk about what they signed ten years ago. I am a big skeptic about that issue, once we had a real dialogue, today that dialogue does not exist with Kurtin”, Vuciq said.

In a statement to the media last week, Vucic said there are no major expectations, adding that he expects Schelz to listen to Serbia for the dialogue process.

The “is a good possibility that we will have little time to express our views”, Vuciq said.

Serbia's president said the situation regarding Kosovo “is not good”, that Serbs in Kosovo “are under strong pressure” and that everything is going towards “the requirement for recognising Kosovo's independence from Serbia”.

“Situata in Kosovo is dramatic because they want to use the situation in Ukraine to influence Serbs to accept something”, the president of Serbia said.

After this meeting, Vuciq will address the nation on Friday. Vuciq is thought to talk about messages from Germany, as well as Serbia's foreign policy direction regarding the war in Ukraine.

Awareers of developments in Belgrade estimate that the meeting in Berlin is the Western effort to intensify talks on resolving open issues in the region, Kosovo and BiH.

They stress that with Vuciki's visit to Berlin and the meeting with Scholz, Lajcak and Kurti, pressure is added to Serbia to harmonise foreign policy with the EU's common one on the Ukrainian issue, and to resume dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo, in terms of results.

Political analysts estimate that with the Vucinq- Kurti meeting in Berlin at Lajcak's presence, dialogue will return to the agenda. It is stressed that recent EU times, as well as visits by American officials, have been heard the need for both sides to continue dialogue and to make progress.

Official Belgrade believes that to advance the dialogue, it is necessary to implement all that is agreed upon, and especially to form the Association of Serbian municipalities, which Pristina rejects.

In Serbia it is believed that after the start of the war in Ukraine, US and German diplomatic activities in the region intensified.

A more active role of Germany is noted after the recent visit of Foreign Affairs Minister Annalena Backock to the Western Balkans. In addition to High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina Christian Schmidt, Germany has for the first time a special envoy for the Western Balkans, and now the meeting at the highest political level between Serbia and Kosovo is organised in Berlin. / RTK