Summary of the day
Kosovo’s foreign minister called on western capitals to take action against Serbia. “Now, nothing can remain as it was,” Donika Gërvalla-Schwarz said.
Milan Radoičić, a Kosovo Serb politician who had admitted to involvement in a deadly gun battle with police on 24 September that raised concerns about the region’s stability, has been arrested.
Vladimír Bilčík, a Slovak member of the European parliament and negotiator for Serbia, said that both Belgrade and Pristina “have enormous responsibility to make sure that we get back to the dialogue as soon as possible”.
Armenia’s national assembly ratified the founding statute of the international criminal court. Russia was not happy.
Germany called for international observers to stay in Nagorno-Karabakh to help build “trust” for civilians.
Updated
Engjellushe Morina, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said that the heightened tension between Kosovo and Serbia “doesn’t come as a surprise.”
“I don’t think the dialogue process was going well,” she told the Guardian, adding that the way Kosovo’s prime minister Albin Kurti has handled the process “exposed many difficulties in the relations … in integrating the north of Kosovo, but also in the difficulties and some impossibilities in trying to normalise relations with Serbia.”
“The attempts to try and resolve it are very much focused on minority rights, when the problem is purely territorial … Serbia doesn’t want to let go of control of this part of Kosovo,” she added.
“Now,” Morina said, “we realise that this is a serious security issue more than anything else.”
