Kosovo and Serbia have signed an agreement to supply energy to the four Serb-majority municipalities of northern Kosovo, implementing an earlier deal reached in 2015 as part of the EU-facilitated dialogue.
EU envoy for the dialogue Miroslav Lajcak made the announcement on Twitter.
“Very pleased to announce that Kosovo and Serbia just adopted the Energy Agreements’ Implementation Roadmap in the framework of the EU-facilitated Dialogue. This is a major step forward,” he wrote.
The news was also confirmed by Kosovo’s negotiator Besnik Bislimi.
We finally adopted the Implementation Roadmap on Energy Agreements of 2013 & 2015. This enables billing of electricity in 4 Northern Municipalities of Kosova, under Kosova laws and regulatory system. pic.twitter.com/39xvPCB1Ym
— Besnik Bislimi (@BislimiBesnik) June 21, 2022
Serbs living in four northern municipalities have not paid for electricity since the end of the Kosovo-Serbia war, which led to Kosovo’s independence.
But in November 2021, Kosovo’s energy network operator KOSSTT announced it would stop supplying Serb-majority municipalities with free electricity. The decision came after an €11 million agreement to subsidize power in these regions expired last year.
“Any eventual agreement between Kosovo and Serbia on the issue of energy, will not change even a single comma beyond what was already agreed in Brussels in 2013 and 2015,” Bislimi had said earlier this month.
Serbia and Kosovo had reached an initial deal in 2015 within the framework of the EU-facilitated dialogue Kosovo-Serbia. According to that deal a Belgrade-backed company would be in charge of supplying energy to the four municipalities in the north.
Bislimi and his Serbian counterpart Petar Petkovic will continue negotiations in Brussels in the hope of setting up a meeting between Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic.
Dialogue between the two countries has stalled since July 2021. While head negotiators have met on several occasions, but have yet to settle on agenda matters for a formal meeting between Kosovo’s and Serbia’s leaders.
In May, Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic had dinner with Lajcak in Berlin, after each party met separately with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The informal dinner was an attempt to revive the dialogue, which has remained in frozen since July 2021.
