NATO meets seeking to avoid another war in Europe

Ukraine wasn’t the only European conflict on the agenda as NATO foreign ministers met in Brussels. The frozen conflict in the Western Balkans, which runs the risk of slipping into a full-blown war, was also an urgent talking point.

As tensions boil on the Kosovan-Serbian border, NATO is looking into permanently increasing its military presence in Kosovo, confirmed the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. NATO has already sent a thousand additional soldiers to the region over the last few months, raising its troop level there to roughly 5000.

And understandably so. As Tim Marshall wrote last month in Reaction, NATO peacekeepers in Kosovo are very likely the only thing preventing Belgrade from invading. 

Kosovo won de facto independence from Belgrade in 1999, with the help of a NATO bombing campaign which drove the Serbian army out of the province. A peacekeeping force of NATO troops has remained there ever since, securing the country’s borders with Belgrade. Originally it comprised 50,000 peacekeepers. In more recent years, that number has significantly reduced, while remaining enough to maintain a fragile peace.

But over the past few months, that peace appears less secure than ever. 

In May, ethnic Serbs living in Northern Kosovo staged riots which injured dozens of peacekeepers. Then in September, 30 heavily armed ethnic Serbs attacked a police patrol in Kosovo, resulting in the death of one policeman and three Serb militiamen. 

This latter flare-up prompted an alarming escalation from Belgrade, which mobilised its forces on the border with Kosovo. 

The situation was defused by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken who made an urgent phone call to Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic. A few days later, Vucic declared that he would draw down forces on the border and that Serbia had no intention of invading Kosovo. 

But NATO cannot afford to be complacent. Not least because Moscow has every interest in stoking tensions. While there’s no direct evidence that Putin played any part in this year’s spike in violence in Kosovo, make no mistake, he would benefit from instability in the Balkans. It would avert attention from the war in Ukraine and use up NATO resources. 

Russia – which does not recognize Kosovo’s independence – has armed Serbia. And Belgrade knows that if it were to invade Kosovo, it would have Moscow’s backing. 

As Tim Marshall warns, the Kremlin’s influence in Republika Sprska in Bosnia is even greater. The Republika Srpska police force “increasingly resembles an army, equipped with heavy machine guns and armoured personal carriers courtesy of Moscow.”

Fortifying NATO’s Balkans flank may feel like a tall order for NATO at a time when war in Ukraine has already worn the alliance thin. But it would be very short-sighted just to leave tensions there to fester. 

Azerbaijan’s military advance into Nagorno-Karabakh back in September, which forced ethnic Armenians there to flee en-masse, was a stark reminder that frozen conflicts can heat up again at any given moment. 

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