A significant number of Serbs do not recognize the legitimacy of the authorities in Pristina. Kosovo's government insists that the Law on Foreigners is simply a mechanism to ensure that residents have the correct documents. Many Kosovo Serbs, however, are convinced that the measure targets them and is designed to either make them foreigners in their own homes or force them out of Kosovo for good.
An increase in defense spending has been most visible and sustained in Serbia. Over the past decade, there has been pressure to replace weapons inherited from the Yugoslav People's Army, while the political leadership has also recognized the political and symbolic value of such investments.
What many in the West perceived as a strategic blunder is increasingly seen in Moscow as a costly but necessary and ultimately successful gamble. As the all-out war in Ukraine enters its fifth year, Russian political elites remain convinced that their leader, Vladimir Putin, did not make a grave error by launching it in February 2022. Instead, they are looking back with a sense of achievement, and they have good reason to believe that the war is ending on their terms, perhaps even soon.
"My mother and sisters were killed on that day. For 26 years, I have not known where their bodies are buried. Every time I see a pit, I think they might be lying there," Gashi says. For more than two decades, he has been haunted by the feeling that the truth could lie right beneath his feet, but remains out of reach.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Friday that both Ukraine and Russia had begun a weeklong pause in attacks on each other's energy infrastructure amid plummeting winter temperatures. In all our regions, from Friday night, there were indeed no strikes on energy facilities. Almost none. Except for the Donetsk region, where there was one strike on gas infrastructure an aerial bomb hit, he said.
