Hello my dear readers, this post is paywalled, as I have noticed that it’s the better way to convert subscribers into paid subscribers. For those of you just tuning in, I relaunched a more traditional newsletter type of Substack last week, but that newsletter will be supplemented with essays like this one. It has been a rollercoaster for Serbia-Turkey relations this week, and since that is extremely my beat, I decided to dedicate an entire article to this week’s melodrama. I have included some detail and background that I haven’t seen remarked upon anywhere else. If you’re into that kind of thing, and can spare $5 a month, consider becoming a paid subscriber today.
PRIZREN–I flew into Prishtina airport on Wednesday afternoon, and I wasn’t alone. Another, more precious piece of cargo arrived on a different flight from Turkey around the same time. That flight carried containers packed with “thousands” of Turkish Skydagger kamikaze drones. Kosovo had reportedly signed a contract with Turkey’s defense company Baykar back in December, and has purchased drones from Turkey before, but this week’s delivery of Skydagger kamikaze drones briefly brought Turkey-Serbia relations to their lowest point since Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic came to power. Infuriated by Kosovo Prime Minister Kurti’s announcement about the arrival of the drones, Vucic took to Twitter to vent his frustrations, accusing Turkey of harboring dreams of “reviving the Ottoman Empire” and of “not wanting stability in the Balkans”. The last time the Serbian leadership directed such harsh rhetoric at Turkey was in 2013, when Erdogan gave a speech in Prizren in which he declared “Kosovo is Turkey; Turkey is Kosovo” and all hell subsequently broke loose. In one memorable comment following that event, then-President Tomislav Nikolic of the ruling SNS remarked that “the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk are no longer the ideas of the Turkish leadership.”
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