Podgorica, 22 October 2026, dtt-net.com – Kosovo’s prime minister today in Montenegro’s Seint Stefan coastal town made yet another public call to the governments of 27 EU member countries to start treating his December 2022 application for accession in the European bloc, which is being ignored in silence since because of five member states (Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain) refusing to recognize independence declared in 2008 and recognized by the other 22 EU countries, which is the same reason of NATO refusing Kosovo calls to for entry in the western military alliance too.
At his speech at the Germany-led Berlin-forum held this time in Monteegro – the frontrunner country in EU entry process – Albin Kurti once more called European bloc’s governments to end the silence and mandate the European Commission (EC) to proceed with sending the “Questionnaire” to Prishtina over the membership application of four years ago.
“We uphold the values of Article 2, and independent evaluations place us among the countries with the greatest democratic progress in Southern Europe, from the fight against corruption to the rule of law. In foreign policy, we act as a member: from day one, we have applied every EU sanction against Russia, and in Kosova, Moscow has never found a crack in Europe. We have done what was ours alone to do. Kosova’s application has waited since December 2022 for a decision that is the EU’s alone. Until then, we remain the only country in the Western Balkans without candidate status,” Kurti said.
Article 2 of the EU Treaty says that EU “is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities. These values are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail.”
Kurti then turned to the fragile stability in the region recalling Serbia’s attempts to destabilize Kosovo in a Russia-type of malign and hybrid attacks against EU countries, on top of military ongoing military aggression against Ukraine.
“Stability bought at the expense of neighbouring democracies has proven a dangerous myth, because those who create instability cannot guarantee stability. That has often been the case in our region. Beyond the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia has turned what connects the Union into a target: its airspace, its undersea cables, its critical infrastructure, and even its people, through acts of terror. Each attack is kept small and deniable, beneath the threshold of a joint response, but together they aim at the whole. Europe as such,” Kurti said over the context of the situation in Ukraine and aims and attempts of Russia’s Vladimir Purtin to destabilize the European bloc, before speaking of (in)stability in the Western Balkans, focusing on Serbia under leadership of Putin-friendly former President and prime minister candidate in October 25 elections Aleksandar Vucic, toward Kosovo in the last three years especially.
“In Kosova, a neighbour has used the same tradecraft, for the same ends, against our state. Last month, we marked three years since the terrorist attack in the northern village of Banjska that left our police sergeant Afrim Bunjaku dead. Next month, we will mark two years since the kinetic warfare unfolded as an assault on our critical infrastructure, blowing up the Ibër-Lepenc water supply canal in the northern village of Varaga. Both were built to be deniable. The man who has admitted responsibility for Banjska, Milan Radoiçiq, a criminal and a local proxy, still roams free, out in the open, sheltered by the very same state apparatus,” Kurti said over 24 September 2023 attack by Vucic’s gunmen of nearly 100 heavy armed and trained in Serbia members, who entered Kosovo north from Serbia attacking Kosovo police and running back to Serbia after a whole day of war-alike day three years ago.
Kurti at the same time called European, USA and Canada governments for membership in the western military alliance, the NATO, which is also refusing membership, and even the Partnership for Peace (PfP) program to Kosovo since application in 2012, because of four non-recognizers (Greece, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain).
“An attack on a European democracy is an attack on all of Europe, and deserves a collective answer, because a response built case by case is not deterrence. For Kosova, NATO membership brings deterrence too,” he called.
Kurti concluded his speech about the state of play of the situation of the suppressed rights of Albanian minority in Serbia’s southern region, known as ‘Presevo Valley’.
“I call on you to look closely at the Presheva Valley, where Albanians are being pushed, step by step, out of institutional, public and civic life, until staying becomes harder than leaving. Yet human dignity and human rights comes first among the values we should share together,” he said.
Presevo Valley Albanians continue complaining to Kosovo government, Albania government and the EU institutions accusing Serbia’s government of discrimination, and also what they call “silent ethnic cleansing”, through “Residence deregistration”.
Kurti had written a letter to new EU’s chief of diplomacy, Kaja Kallas, in February 2025, accusing Serbia authorities of “systematic discrimination, passivization of addresses and ethnic administrative cleansing” of Presevo Valley ethnic Albanians, referring to more nearly 7000 Albanians who had been ‘passivized’ with the municipality of Medvegja alone witnessing the deletion of approximately 4,000 residents from the voter rolls.
“These figures show that over 10 percent of the Albanian population in Presheva Valley are no longer able to exercise their most basic rights as citizens of Serbia,” he recalled back then.
The situation remains unchanged and the EU Commission and its member states continue ignoring ongoing complaints of valley’s Albanians.
