Renounced request for surrender of Radojciki Kosova achieves agreement with Serbia on functionalisation of the commission to be found

Kosovo's chief negotiator, Besnik Bislimi, said reconciliation with Serbia has been achieved for the functioning of the joint commission to implement the agreement on missing persons during the war in Kosovo.
After the new round of dialogue in Brussels, Bislimi said that now it remains that representatives of Kosovo and Serbia delegations meet “in the coming weeks and set the first priorities for the work of the joint commission”.

The agreement was reached after hours of talks that the European mediator in the dialogue, Peter Sorensen, conducted separately with Bisimi and Serbia's chief negotiator, Petar Petkov.

At the end of these meetings, a joint meeting was held in which the agreement was formalised.

The new round of dialogue took place after Sorensen's visit to Pristina and Belgrade last week.

On the issue of missing persons, Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbia's president, Aleksandar Vuciq, agreed in 2023 on the Joint Declaration on Missing Persons.

The parties agreed on the full implementation of the joint declaration for missing persons during a trilateral meeting among chief negotiators in December 2024 in Brussels.

The first meeting was to be held in January, but the Serbian side refused to participate because of actions to close offices supported by Serbia in Kosovo.

Today's meeting was the first in the context of dialogue for normalising relations between Serbia and Kosovo this year.

During his visit to Pristina on January 14th, Sorensen said about the dialogue that “I have hope that 2026 will give us what 2025 did not give us”.

“What we're going to do is make sure the parties sit down and talk. We have to find a way for this to happen”, Sorensen stressed in Pristina.

He said he would work to find a way for the two neighbouring countries to hold high-level talks in an effort to normalise relations.

Kosovo and Serbia have not held a high-level meeting since 2023, following increasing tensions between them due to an attack by a group of armed Serbs against the Kosovo Police in the predominantly Serb province in September that year.

Kurti é, who is expected to lead the country's government, has also conditioned the continuation of dialogue with the handover of the suspect for the attack on Zvecan Banjska that left a dead sergeant, Milan Radojic.

Radoic was deputy chairman of the Serbian List, the largest party of Kosovo Serbs when the attack occurred and took responsibility for it. Belgrade has refused to hand over Kosovo it, and is said to be wandering freely in Serbia.

Serbia also has its own terms in dialogue, as Petkovovic reaffirmed after meeting with Sorensen on 16 January in Belgrade.

The Serbian chief negotiator said progress in the dialogue mediated by the bloc depends on Kosovo's willingness to establish an association of multi-Serb municipalities.

Kosovo and Serbia only reached agreement on the road to normalisation, known as the Ohrid Agreement, in 2023, but are not implementing it.

Among the provisions of the agreement is also the establishment of the Association of Serb majority municipalities in Kosovo, but Pristina has not taken steps to meet that requirement. /Radio Free Europe/