More Kosovo troops, Albania urges NATO

SKOPJE, North Macedonia — Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama urged NATO on Wednesday to further boost its military forces in Kosovo and secure the country’s borders with Serbia, warning that recent ethnic violence in Kosovo could potentially trigger a wider Balkan conflict.

Kosovo’s border with Serbia was “out of control,” Rama said after an informal meeting of Western Balkan NATO members in North Macedonia.

He said the frontier was being used for a host of illegal activities, including drugs and arms smuggling and infiltration by ultra nationalists, that could lead to “great disturbances” in the region.

Kosovo, which has an ethnic Albanian majority, is a former Serbian province. It gained independence with the help of a NATO military campaign, launched in 1999 to end a bloody Serb crackdown on an armed separatist movement.

Tensions remain high, with violence breaking out twice in recent months, and Western countries fear that Russia could try to foment trouble in the Balkans to avert attention from the war in Ukraine.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, who attended the meeting in North Macedonia’s capital, Skopje, insisted after Wednesday’s talks that NATO doesn’t see any military threat to its allies in the Western Balkans.

“But what we do see is an increase in tensions, especially in Kosovo,” Stoltenberg said.

He said that NATO has strengthened its military presence in Kosovo — established after the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia — with about 1,000 additional troops and heavier weaponry.