Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic this week put his nation’s army on its “highest level of combat readiness” and claimed neighboring Kosovo’s military was planning “an attack” on the ethnic Serbian enclaves near the border amid flaring tensions, the BBC reports. The ethnically Albanian nation of Kosovo broke away from Serbia in 1999 at the end of the last major war in continental Europe prior Russia’s attack on Ukraine last year. A formal declaration of independence, which Belgrade does not recognize, followed in 2008. NATO troops have been stationed in the tiny country ever since.
Earlier this month Serb militias in the country’s north set up roadblocks and seized control of several towns after the Kosovan government declared Serbian government-issued license plates illegal and ordered all drivers to turn them in for “Republic of Kosovo” plates. While that’s obviously an especially fucking petty reason for this war to have started if and when it does, you could also say if it wasn’t that then it would’ve been something else. The Balkans is the reason why “Balkanization,” a word for fragmentation, is already in your device’s spellcheck.