Bishop Teodosije propagandized in Russian media: The Serbian people in Kosovo are threatened with extinction

The Serbian Orthodox Church often distorts the facts and propagandizes on pro-Kremlin Russian channels. Bishop Teodosije’s statement, for example, allegedly stated that “the Serbian people in Kosovo are threatened with extinction”. His statement was published this week by the Russian agency RIA Novosti in a text entitled “Serbs from Kosovo are threatened with extinction”.

The bishop was addressing the faithful recently gathered in the Draganac monastery.

What did Bishop Teodosije say?

“We who live in this territory today are in a situation where many are leaving us, many friends, many people, where dark clouds hang over us and where people are afraid, where they are threatened from all sides, but the biggest one – with what we will disappear from the territory and leave their homes,” said Bishop Teodosije.

https://www.stat.gov.rs/oblasti/stanovnistvo/

RiA Novosti adds that according to data from Belgrade, more than 14 percent of Kosovo Serbs, whose total number is estimated at 100,000 people, have left Kosovo in the last year alone. They also quote Dmitry Poliansky, Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, who said at a recent UN Security Council meeting “that the flashpoint in Gaza will soon be threatened by another one – the Balkans – due to the actions of the Kosovo authorities against the Serbs”.

https://www.stat.gov.rs/media/358684/procenjen-broj-stanovnika-i-stanovnistvo.pdf

Analysis:

Serbs from Kosovo are in no way endangered by the CBK’s decision to introduce the euro as the sole means of payment. This regulation combats the financing of terrorism and illegal activities. Likewise, the information from Belgrade that 14% of Serbs have left Kosovo within a year is not correct. According to the official data of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MIA) of Kosovo, presented in January this year, for four years from 2018 to 2022. 156,080 people left Kosovo, which is 8.85 percent of the state’s population. According to the Ministry of Interior of Kosovo, 26,329 residents immigrated to Kosovo in the period 2020-2022, while more than 93,000 residents immigrated from Kosovo. According to the results of the last census from 2011, Kosovo has 1,739,825 inhabitants, of which 1,616,869 or 92.9 percent are Albanians. Serbia should actually ask itself whether and how satisfied its citizens are in their country and whether Serbs, the majority of the population in Serbia, are threatened with “extinction “. The data from the last census in 2022 shows that the number of citizens in Serbia has fallen by half a million since the last census. Data from the Serbian Statistical Office shows that the city of Kraljevo alone has 14,000 fewer inhabitants according to the last census. In all regions of Serbia, with the exception of the capital region, the number of inhabitants fell by around 10 percent. The number of inhabitants in the Vojvodina region in the north is around 182,000 lower. In the South and East Serbia region, there are now almost 143,000 fewer inhabitants compared to the previous census, while the largest decrease was recorded in the Šumadija region and in the west of Serbia.

/G. Venhari, The Geopost