Serbian President to Visit Kosovo in September

Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic will visit Kosovo on September 9 to present "guidelines and directions of state policy towards Kosovo," he announced on Friday during an official visit to the Clinical Centre of Serbia, N1 television reported.

He added that he will not deliver "a plan for a final solution" to normalising relations between Belgrade and Pristina "because it does not yet exist".

His planned visit will take place around the same time that a new round of EU-mediated talks between him and his Kosovo counterpart, Hashim Thaci, is expected to take place in Brussels, although the specific date is yet to be announced.

On Thursday evening, Vucic told Serbian broadcaster RTS "we [Serbia] have a defined territory from the Western powers and factually defined territory on the ground that is against us."

He added that Serbs call the borders at Jarinje and Brnjak "administrative crossings", as Serbia doesn't recognise Kosovo's independence, and that "we [Serbs] cannot enter Kosovo, except through secret channels, without crossing that border".

He did not elaborate on what the secret channels were.

Vucic also said on Thursday that he's convinced that if any agreement between Pristina and Belgrade is reached "we [Serbia] will have more than [we do] today" and asked all Serbs to show "much more tolerance" to a possible deal.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, which Belgrade opposes. However, the EU's main precondition for Serbia's bid for EU membership is for it to normalise relations with Kosovo.

Vucic's announcement of his visit to Kosovo comes almost three weeks after he proposed that a way to normalise ties between them could be some form of partition of Kosovo - an idea that has been...