The President of Serbia announces that he will ask NATO to deploy the Serbian Army in Kosovo

The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, announced this Saturday that he will ask NATO to deploy the Serbian Army and Police in Kosovo amid an upturn in tension in recent hours at the border crossings with Serbia.

This request, without any type of precedent since the end of the Kosovo war more than 20 years ago, culminates for the moment an afternoon that began with the postponement of local elections in the Serb-majority areas of northern Kosovo and has ended with the erection of Kosovar Serb barricades that have led to the intervention of the Kosovar Police on the border.

Although the president has "had no illusions" about the possibility that NATO would accept such a deployment at such a critical moment, Vucic has defended that Serbia has the right to make this request and criticized the margin of maneuver that the authorities are enjoying. Kosovars, who have declared their intention to apply this month for their application to join the European Union, as he has made known in a speech picked up by channel B92.

If the request is confirmed, it would be the first time that Belgrade requests to deploy in Kosovo, under the provisions of a UN Security Council resolution that ended a 1998-1999 war, in which NATO ended up interceding to protect Kosovo, with its Albanian majority.

According to the resolution cited by Vucic, Serbia can deploy up to 1,000 military, police and customs personnel at Orthodox Christian religious sites, areas with Serb majorities and border crossings, if such deployment is approved by the NATO mission commander, KFOR. .

Vucic has reported that the Serbian government will end up providing more information regarding this request at the beginning of next week, at the latest, and added that it has also sent a letter to the heads of state and government of the countries of the European Union (Slovakia, Greece, Spain, Romania and Cyprus) that do not recognize the independence of Kosovo to do everything possible to block Kosovar accession efforts. "They are friends of ours and I hope the letter means something", he has stated.

Actually, the president has ended up specifying the comments made on Friday by the Serbian Prime Minister, Ana Brnabic, in which the possibility of this request was already advancing.

"The president will soon give information about it because it is clear that KFOR is not doing its job well and because the Kosovo Serbs do not feel protected and their lives, including the lives of small children, are under threat," Brnabic denounced.

The president of Kosovo, Vjosa Osmani, described these words as an "open threat of police and military aggression" before deferring the local elections in the north of Kosovo, originally scheduled for December 18, until April 23, given the chaotic situation in the area.

In the face of the inability to reach an agreement on the so-called "license plate crisis" -- a long series of clashes between Kosovo and Serbia over vehicle identification plates, issued by Serbia, and whose powers Kosovo intended to assume until an agreement was reached At the end of November, through EU mediation, Kosovar Serb mayors, judges and police officers decided to resign from their functions and open an institutional vacuum in the area.

On November 15, the Kosovo Serb List party declared its total and complete resignation from the local elections, where the election of the mayors of four Serb-majority municipalities was scheduled: Mitrovica North, Zubin Potok, Leposavic and Zvecan, all governed by mayors of this formation, who had resigned five days earlier.

After several nights of violent incidents that have left at least one Kosovo police officer injured by alleged Serb shots, the situation ended up worsening with the arrest of a Kosovo Serb police officer, one of the resigned officers, which led to the uprising of the population of the area with barricades that have paralyzed transit through the territory, hence the intervention of the Kosovar Police.