Correctly sensing that big trouble is brewing in little Kosovo, Russia and Communist China are teaming up to make it clear whose side they are on: Serbia’s. While for the moment the anti-Western bluster coming from Moscow and Beijing over the latest crisis in the Balkans is just that, it portends complications for both EU enlargement and political stability in the increasingly strategic southeast corner of Europe. 

While tiny Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia in 2008 and has applied for EU membership, its diplomatic recognition is not yet universal. Serbia, for one, does not recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state even though relations between Belgrade and Pristina were officially normalized with the 2013 Brussels Agreement. 

Lately there has been a lot of disagreement in the landlocked country that descended into war following the breakup of Yugoslavia. The NATO-led peacekeeping force at the center of the current storm known as KFOR, or Kosovo Force, is a legacy of the airstrikes NATO conducted in spring 1999 that culminated in the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo. A majority of Kosovans are ethnic Albanians, but ethnic Serbs comprise a sizable minority. 

Tensions have now pitted Kosovo’s police and NATO-led peacekeepers against local Serbs, leaving dozens of people injured on all sides. Tensions started to flare when Kosovo’s police raided areas in the region’s Serb-majority north and seized local municipality buildings. In elections last month, it was mainly ethnic Albanians who were elected to mayoral posts. 

Kosovo’s prime minister, Albin Kurti, maintains that the mayors are legitimate and said that “extremist” protestors do not represent the Serbian people. But the chief negotiator for Serbia in the Brussels-led EU dialogue has countered that Mr. Kurti wants to provoke a war in order to dodge EU-mandated obligations to recognize certain Serbian civic rights on the municipal level.

In short, it is a mess. In the meantime, clashes prompted Serbia to raise the combat readiness of its troops stationed near the border and warned it wouldn’t stand by if Serbs in Kosovo were attacked again. Fears are growing of a renewal of the violent 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo, which claimed thousands of lives and created a large-scale refugee crisis. That is why the NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, announced the dispatch of  700 troops to  Kosovo, with additional forces now on high alert.

“These are cautious steps,” Mr. Stoltenberg said in a statement. “NATO and KFOR have the forces and capabilities they need to fulfill the mandate of the UN.” KFOR initially came to Kosovo in June 1999 following the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1244. 

If you want to send the Kremlin’s propaganda machine into overdrive, mention of the words “NATO” and “Kosovo” tends to do the trick. 

“We call on the West to finally stop its false propaganda and to stop blaming the incidents in Kosovo on the desperate Serbs who are trying to defend their legitimate rights and freedom through peaceful and non-armed means,” Russia’s foreign ministry said in a statement. The Russian ambassador to Serbia, Aleksandar Bochan-Kharchenko, warned of “an explosion in the entire region.”

Serbia is a quixotic country on the European scene. A candidate for accession to the European Union, it has nevertheless refused to implement most of the bloc’s sanctions against Moscow since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Both Serbia and Russian are mainly Slavic, Eastern Orthodox countries, so it would only be surprising if Russia did not back Belgrade. 

It does, and according to some reports, the Wagner mercenary group is present in Serbia and possibly in locations near the shared border with Kosovo.

A spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, Mao Ning, has blamed the ongoing violence on what he termed Kosovo’s failure to respect Serbian political rights and said China supports Serbia’s efforts “to protect sovereignty and territorial integrity.” During a press conference, Mr. Ming said that Beijing “opposes the unilateral actions of the temporary self-governing institutions of Kosovo.”

In a subtle way, those remarks are the drawing of battle lines and an attempt to delegitimize the governing institutions at Pristina. 

At least 30 NATO troops have sustained injuries in clashes with Serbs so far, some having been wounded by firearms. Journalists on the scene at the municipality of Leposavic reported being struck with stones, eggs, and bottles hurled by people in masks.   

As a measure of how volatile the situation is, consider remarks from the Serbian president, Alexander Vucic: “There is one condition so small that I can’t believe that people from QUINT and the most powerful Western countries cannot fulfill it — that is the withdrawal of Pristina’s special police forces from the north of Kosovo and the removal of fake mayors who do not represent anyone. Truth, justice and Serbia will eventually win.”

QUINT is the decision-making group that includes France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and America. 

The American ambassador to Kosovo, Jeff Hovenier, has said that the NATO-led Defender 2023 exercise, which was to take place across the region, will now be canceled as a “consequence” for Pristina.

According to a statement from Mr. Hovenier, the Kosovan premier, Mr. Kurti, has not responded to American requests to tamp down tensions in the north.  “We are analyzing what our next actions will be,” Mr. Hovenier said. 

No doubt Moscow and Beijing are too.