Kosovo was deprived of a machine gun

Moscow and Beijing did not release Albanians from the Security Council

The situation around the status of Kosovo has escalated to the limit. The United States, France and Great Britain will submit a new version of the resolution to the UN Security Council in the coming days and will put it to a vote without additional discussions. US Ambassador to the UN Zalmay Khalilzad said yesterday that "the next week or ten days will be decisive."

According to Vremya Novostei, the new draft resolution, like the previous ones, is based on the plan of the UN Secretary General’s special envoy Martti Ahtisaari. It gives Kosovo independence under international supervision. Russia rejects the independence of the region, since this is still unacceptable for one of the parties to the conflict - Serbia.

To avoid a Russian veto, the US and EU are now slightly changing the text. The previous draft (introduced to the UN Security Council in June) talked about the start of a new 120-day round of negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina. If the Serbs and Albanians had not reached an agreement during this time, the region would have automatically received supervised independence. Russia was not against negotiations, but if they failed, it sought to return the problem to the UN Security Council. Yesterday, at a two-hour meeting of the Security Council, Moscow succeeded in this, and it forced the West to abandon the automatic declaration of independence for Kosovo.

Even the passionate speeches of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the head of the UN Mission in the region, Joachim Rücker, in support of an early decision on Kosovo's status, did not help. If "the status of Kosovo remains uncertain, there is a real risk that the progress made by the UN and the Provisional Institutions in Kosovo will begin to erode," Ban Ki-moon said. To this, Russia and China, which chairs the UN Security Council this month, responded that the decision on the status should be made by Belgrade and Pristina. And yesterday, some anonymous but clearly knowledgeable experts in Moscow told news agencies that they consider the speech of the UN Secretary General “strange,” “surprising,” and “impartial.”

Western diplomats yesterday did not hide their irritation with Russia. “While the Europeans are ready to take on additional responsibility, Russia is only criticizing,” Mr. Khalilzad complained. And Deputy Permanent Representative of Great Britain to the UN, Karen Pierce, even got the impression that it is not Russia, but Serbia that “has the right of veto in the Security Council.”

“The problem remains that all the draft resolutions proposed by our Western partners are still based on the Ahtisaari plan,” Andrei Dronov, head of the Pristina branch of the Russian Embassy in Serbia, explained the Russian position to VN. — Moscow considered this plan weak from the very beginning. Mr. Ahtisaari ignored Belgrade's arguments." One of the reasons why Serbia rejects the idea of ​​Kosovo independence is due to the plight of hundreds of thousands of Serbian refugees in the province. “We have lived in peace with our Albanian neighbors for decades,” Serb Novica Jovanovic, head of the Kosovo village of Srpski Babush, told VN. - The troubles began when Albanian terrorists came, and NATO supported them. Today in the surrounding villages, which have always been Serbo-Albanian, there are only Albanians. We do not communicate with them, although no dangerous incidents occur. If we settle down now, improve our lives, and find work, thousands of Serbs will begin to return to Kosovo. But if Kosovo’s independence is recognized, everything will fall apart, and the remaining Serbs will leave the region.”

While Russia and Serbia reject the Ahtisaari plan as not taking into account the interests of the Kosovo Serbs, the Kosovo Albanians criticize it for being half-hearted. “This plan provides for maintaining international presence and control in Kosovo,” Agron Bajrami, president of the Kosovo Institute of Media and editor-in-chief of the most popular Albanian-language newspaper Koha Ditore, emphasized in an interview with VN. “International officials will even oversee our relations with the world community!”

Complaining about excessive control by the world community, Albanian leaders are actively preparing for independence. “We are confident in the economic viability of an independent Kosovo,” Kosovo Minister for Planning and Environmental Protection Ardjan Gini told VN. According to him, one of the sources of development of the region could be the Trepcha mining and processing plant in the north. But the minister admits that this plant, built during Yugoslav times, is now not working: “Our mining deposits and processing facilities were greatly degraded in the 1990s. We have to decide what to do with Trepca: what investments are needed, whether this plant will be fully privatized or transferred to mixed public-private ownership." Among Kosovo's other reserves, the minister names rich deposits of brown coal, as well as agriculture. All that remains is to find investment, and to do this, decide on the status of the region.

Petr ISKENDEROV, Pristina - Srpski Babush - Moscow