Less: The time when the US and the EU could unilaterally impose a solution for Kosovo's status has passed

Timothy Less, an associate at the Center for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge, said for Kosovo Online that the meetings in Brussels yesterday had not brought any results, except the confirmation that the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue was leading nowhere.

Following separate meetings between the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, and the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, with EU leaders and the leaders of France, Germany, and Italy, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, announced that balanced European proposals for the establishment of the Community of Serb Municipalities had been presented at the meetings but that no agreement had been reached because the parties had not been ready to accept it without preconditions.

When asked whether the continuation of the dialogue and the normalization process is possible, given that Belgrade and the Serbs insist on the formation of the Community of Serb Municipalities while Kosovo Prime Minister Kurti rejects this and says there will be no resumption of negotiations until sanctions are imposed on Serbia for the events in Banjska, Less says that he sees all of this "as merely another confirmation that the dialogue has failed."

"I think it was never likely to succeed because it's a bad deal from Kosovo's perspective. It requires autonomy for Serbs without any guarantees of recognition by Serbia or Kosovo's EU and NATO membership. Moreover, all of this is happening in a new geopolitical context where we are witnessing the breakdown of the existing international order. Russia has seemingly prevailed in Ukraine, war is breaking out in the Middle East, and the previously dominant position of the West is now subject to open challenges from new revisionist powers, not only Russia but also China, Turkey, and Iran. The days when the US and the EU could unilaterally impose a solution for Kosovo's status have passed," Less says.

He says that he is increasingly convinced that the resolution of the Kosovo issue will be subsumed into this new geopolitical environment, which, according to him, would involve "returning the north of Kosovo to Serbia through military annexation, and the south becoming part of a new expanded Albanian national state."