Kosovo, the target of Serbian-Russian disinformation last week

Kosovo has been at the center of disinformation spread by high-ranking Serbian and Russian officials over the past week.

This disinformation is aimed at creating a false perception of the Kosovo government’s actions and conveying a false narrative of “ethnic cleansing” and “persecution” of Serbs in the north of the country. Through a deliberate campaign, Petar Petkovic, Aleksandar Vulin, Sergei Lavrov and others have made baseless accusations against the Kosovo government and manipulated public opinion for political purposes.

The director of the so-called Kosovo Office in Serbia, Petar Petkovic, has disinformed that allegedly “the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, is deliberately conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign to expel the Serbs from northern Kosovo”. At the same time, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandar Vulin disinformed about the alleged “ethnic cleansing” at a meeting with the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Shoigu, in Moscow.

Meanwhile, official Belgrade and the Lista Serbe party have disinformed about the Kosovo Police that they have brutally beaten some young Serbs in the north of Mitrovica First the Prime Minister of Serbia, Miloš Vučević, then Serbian List and finally the President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, reacted. The truth is that on September 10, four young Serbs were arrested by Kosovo police for attacking two policemen in the square north of Mitrovica, one of whom was also injured.

Even the pictures published by some Serbian politicians do not show any violence against them, except that they were handcuffed.

That the property of Serbs in Kosovo was “illegally” expropriated for the construction of bases for the Kosovo Police Special Forces was another piece of disinformation coming from the Director of the Office of Public and Cultural Diplomacy in Serbia, Arno Guyon. The portrayal of the Kosovo authorities as aggressive was made despite the fact that the Kosovo government has made it clear that the expropriation of land is in accordance with the law and that each landowner has received a notice and compensation determined by law.

Meanwhile, the Speaker of the Assembly of Serbia, Ana Brnabic, disinformed the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, that he allegedly wanted a war with Serbia. She also continued the disinformation spread by Serbian officials that “ethnic cleansing” against Serbs is taking place in Kosovo.

While disinforming about Kurti, Brnabic says of Vucic that he is “keeping the peace”, when the opposite is true. Vucic continues to pursue the nationalist narrative of the 1990s against his neighbors and is the source of instability in the Western Balkans region.

Allegations of alleged “ethnic cleansing” and “persecution of Serbs” in Kosovo have also been made by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the spokesperson of this department, Maria Zakharova, who have drawn unfounded parallels with the situation in the Donbass . Lavrov said that the persecution of Serbs could be compared to the “Nazi persecution of Russians in the Donbass”, while Zakharova accused Western countries of giving Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti a “free hand” for the alleged “ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Kosovo”./The Geopost/