(Belgrade) The Serbian army has reduced the number of its troops along the border with Kosovo “to normal”, assured Monday the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Milan Mojsilovic, three days after the warning from Washington against a “major military deployment”.
“The operating regime of the units […] in the security zone” along the “administrative line with Kosovo has been returned to normal,” Serbian General Mojsilovic said in a statement to the press in Belgrade.
“This means that the number of units in this security zone is regular,” he added, specifying that the number of soldiers was reduced from 8,350 to 4,500, a week after the latest violence in the north of the Kosovo.
The leaders of Serbia, which does not recognize the independence proclaimed in 2008 by its former majority Albanian province, describe the border with Kosovo as an “administrative line”.
During the latest violence on September 24, a paramilitary commando composed of several dozen men killed a Kosovar Albanian policeman and injured another on a barricade near the village of Banjska, in northern Kosovo, a region where Serbs are in the majority.
Three members of the commando, all Kosovo Serbs, were subsequently killed and three others arrested during an operation launched by special forces of the Kosovo police. The others fled.
The United States, Kosovo’s main international ally, warned on Friday of a “major Serbian military deployment along the border with Kosovo”, calling on Serbia to “withdraw [ses] troops.”
Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic then accused Washington of uttering “untruths”, without explicitly denying the presence of Serbian soldiers. He said the number of Serbian troops was well below that during a similar deployment in May.
General Mojsilovic said he was “surprised” by the “deep concern of some” about the deployment of Serbian forces during this latest “security crisis”.
According to him, the Serbian army had deployed 14,000 soldiers in the same region in December 2022 and May 2023, during “similar security crises”. Furthermore, he stressed, the Serbian forces had then been placed “at the highest level of alert”, which was not the case last week.