Bislim confirms: Lajcak decided not to have a trilateral appointment

Kosovo's chief negotiator in dialogue with Serbia, Besnik Bislimi, has said Wednesday in Brussels that the mediator of this process, Miroslav Lajcak, has decided not to have a trilateral meeting at this moment.

He made these statements after the meeting that he held with the EU mediator for dialogue, saying the Kosovo side has been interested in a meeting among the three officials, Radio Free Europe reports.

Earlier in the day, Lajcak has also met Serbia's chief negotiator, Petar Petkov.

The “has been what Lajcak's attitude looks like since right now, the trilateral meeting would not necessarily contribute to the finalisation of the documents, because he thinks he still needs additional co-ordination before that happens, and there are ideas that the sequence plan [of the Base Agreement] requires a high-level meeting, according to him, and clearly the chief negotiators cannot successfully complete this process”.

Bislimi has said that with Lajcak he has discussed four topics: the Base Agreement sequence plan, terms of reference for monitoring the Base Agreement, terms of reference to implementing the Declaration on Undiscovered Persons, and the energy agreement.

With the Base Agreement, Bislimi has referred to the compatibility achieved between Kosovo and Serbia in February of this year for normalisation of relations.

The two countries have since been hired for the implementation annex in Ohrid, North Macedonia.

Recent tensions in northern Kosovo have turned the dialogue process into crisis management and have turned the focus off implementation of the Ohrid Agreement.

The situation in northern Kosovo -- the Serb-run residential area -- has been tense since the end of May, when Kosovo Police have assisted the young Albanian mayors of Zvecan, Zubin Potok's Leposaviqi -- despite the resistance of local Serb residents. / REL