Did Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić declare war on Kosovo and order Serbian soldiers to go there? No, that's not true: Lead Stories did not find a single report of Vučić announcing war on Kosovo or sending Serbia's national army to attack Kosovo.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok on May 28, 2023. The text overlay (translated from Serbian to English by Lead Stories staff) read:
Vučić announced war with Kosovo and ordered Serbian soldiers to go to Kosovo. A bit more time and Kosovo will be ours.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon Oct 23 10:04:57 2023 UTC)
Lead Stories performed a Google search (archived here) on October 23, 2023, using the following terms in Serbian: "Vučić najavio rat protiv kosovaor" or, in English, "Vučić announced war against Kosovo." The search produced no results. A search on the official website of the Serbian president (archived here) using the same keywords also showed no results.
Tension has risen again recently in the region. Ethnic Albanians make up the majority of Kosovo's 1.8 million population, but in the north of the country, the majority are ethnic Serbs, around 40,000 people, according to the population census from 2011.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. However, Serbia has not recognized Kosovo as an independent state. Fifteen years later, there are still municipal bodies, public companies, libraries, health facilities, primary and secondary schools, as well as a university -- a total of more than 70 educational institutions -- that operate in Kosovo within the Serbian system, which Kosovo considers illegal, according to the BBC in Serbian.
However, in 2023 new tensions have developed that are continuing. On September 24, 2023, Serbian attackers in armored vehicles stormed the village of Banjska, in the Serb-majority region of northern Kosovo, clashing with Kosovo police, and barricaded themselves in an Orthodox monastery. Kosovo police announced that one policeman and three of the approximately 30 attackers were killed in a shootout around Banjska.
A few days after the attack, Serbian businessman Milan Radoičić, vice president of the Serb List, the political party of the Serbian community in Kosovo, admitted that he personally organized a group of armed attackers who were responsible for the attack in Banjska. His written confession was read to the media by his lawyer Goran Petronijević (translated from Serbian to English by Lead Stories staff):
'I am informing the general public that, together with my copatriots from the north of Kosovo and Metohija, on September 24, 2023, I came to the north of Kosovo and Metohija to the area of the Banjska village. The reason for our return was to encourage the Serbian people from that area in resisting the terror of Kurti's regime, protecting our people who are exposed to that terror every day and to create the conditions needed for the realization of the dream of my people's freedom in the north of Kosovo and Metohija.'
