Western Balkans leaders have signed a declaration urging the EU to make its enlargement to the Western Balkans "a matter of geopolitical significance."

The leaders, gathered at the two-day Brdo-Brijuni Summit in Tirana, signed the declaration on Thursday, the Slovenian agency STA reported.
"The EU should keep in mind that the full integration of the Western Balkans into the European value system is an important a factor as the stability of Europe in general," the declaration said.

Albanian capital Tirana will host the leaders of the Western Balkans on Wednesday and Thursday at the Brdo - Brioni Summit, an initiative launched by Croatia and Slovenia in 2013 to speed up the region’s path to the European Union, BETA news agency reported.

The leaders of Bosnian tripartite Presidency, Milorad Dodik, Sefik Dzaferovic and Zeljko Komsic, as well as the presidents of Montenegro and Serbia, Milo Djukanovic and Aleksandar Vucic, will attend the Summit hosted by Croatian and Slovenian presidents Kolinda Grabar – Kitarovic and Borut Pahor.

Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic will visit Sarajevo on May 8 to take part in an annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD).

Brnabic will start her visit to Sarajevo with a working meeting with EBRD President Sumo Chakrabarti. She is also scheduled to meet with US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Matthew Palmer.

The Washington John Hopkins University’s panel “Western Balkans (WB): Managing the Challenges” dealt with the regional leaders’ real readiness to get closer to the West, adding it should more clearly criticise the WB’s regimes, the Voice of America (VOA) reported on Thursday, as carried by the FoNet news agency.

The goal of the Western Balkans summit in Berlin is get the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue moving, European Commissioner Johannes Hahn told the German DPA news agency.

The Angela Merkel's foreign policy legacy is also in the play in the Kosovo-Serbia conflict and the stability of Europe and the future of the Western ally, believes Bodo Weber.

A senior associate of the Democratization Policy Council, a transatlantic research center based in Berlin, reminds Deutsche Welle (DW) that the negotiations between Kosovo and Serbia on a comprehensive agreement, launched in 2012 at the initiative of Chancellor Merkel herself, has seen a major US diplomatic offensive since the beginning of the year.

''Political stakeholders from Serbia and Kosovo do not have the courage to implement the Brussels Agreement because they are rightfully scared of their own people. They have to look for a way to establish citizens’ equality and to offer solutions to facilitate their everyday life, rather than locking them up in national corrals. They have nothing to offer for a better future to their own people, but they are using the story of ethnic delimitation to obscure their political incompetence. Germany has had a clear position from the very beginning.

European Commissioner Johannes Hahn said in Washington on Wednesday that the United States and European Union want to bring the Western Balkans into the EU.

Our shared goal on both sides of the Atlantic is to stabilize the region and bring all six Western Balkan countries into the EU based on established conditions. That’s in our geopolitical self-interest,” he wrote on his Twitter account from a meeting of the Atlantic Council.

The European Union is not investing strong efforts to resolve the Kosovo-Serbia problem and stimulate reforms in the Western Balkans, but it still wants to stabilize the region, the Beta news agency was told at a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg.

Diplomatic sources told the news agency that the EU’s strategic goal is the security, political and economic stabilization of the Western Balkans.

Any solution (for Kosovo) needs to have support of the mayor powers, particularly the permanent members of the Security Council. We have an interest in being in close partnership with the United States regarding the Western Balkans and to have their support in encouraging in this important process – Sebastian Kurz.

See the interview at: https://bit.ly/2G1CDCB