Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is very significant – both for relations between our two countries and the Kosovo issue, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic tells Belgrade based daily Danas, commenting on the meeting between Vucic and Pompeo, happening in New York today, at the margins of the United Nations Security Council session on the Middle East.
Dacic says he expects Pompeo to send another public call to Pristina to abolish taxes, in order to continue negotiations on normalizing relations. According to Dacic, the US Secretary of State will “certainly” do so.
Representatives from diplomatic circles told Danas daily informally that the fact that Vucic and Pompeo are meeting under the auspices of the United Nations shows that this international organization, “which has lost much of its significance” on the world stage over the past two and a half decades, still has some “weight” internationally.
“The final solution for Kosovo will have to be approved by the” big players “- permanent UNSC members – the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom and France. So, it is no surprise that the president of Serbia and the US secretary of state meet within that body. We don’t know what they will talk about, but Pompeo, who plays a very important role in the foreign policy of President Donald Trump’s administration and is considered a man of Trump’s greatest confidence, advocates a similar opinion on the Kosovo issue as Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton – that “territorial corrections” are also possible if first agreed between Belgrade and Pristina. This attitude of Republicans, like the Pompeo’s, leads to the conclusion that the US administration no longer views Serbia as a weaker party in the negotiations, which is important for the continuation of negotiations,” assess interlocutors of Danas.
According to sources of Danas, there is little chance of “anything spectacular” happening in resolving Kosovo’s problems until the US election, or until the fall of next year, but US is trying to “prepare the ground for a deal.” In this context, they emphasize that the demarcation option is “still on the table, despite opposition from some countries such as Germany.”
“Proponents of the view that borders in the Balkans cannot be corrected often state that this would open the Pandora’s box. But Pandora’s box has, in fact, already been opened – it was done when John Bolton last year announced that the US would not exclude territorial corrections,” diplomats say.
