Trump Claims He’s ‘Ending Mass Killings’ as US Envoy Visits Serbia, Kosovo

Richard Grenell, Donald Trump's Special Presidential Envoy for Serbia and Kosovo Peace Negotiations, is to visit Pristina and Belgrade this week in the wake of comments by the US leader at an election campaign rally that raised eyebrows in the Balkans because they seemed to suggest that violence was still widespread in the region.

In Trump's speech to a rally in North Carolina on Sunday, he claimed that documents signed by Serbia and Kosovo's leaders at the White House earlier this month represented a "historical breakthrough" between the two countries under his auspices which would stop "mass killings", for which he deserves a Nobel prize.

"Next story I'm sure it's a Nobel Peace Prize for peace. We are stopping mass killings between Kosovo and Serbia. They have been killing each other for so many years. They are going to stop killing," Trump told his supporters at the rally.

"I said, 'Fellas, let's get together.' You know, they've been doing it for hundreds of years frankly under different names," he said.

Trump's envoy Grenell said on Twitter on Sunday that "implementing the agreement made by Kosovo and Serbia is a top priority for the Trump Administration".

The agreements that were signed at the White House, which mainly focus on economic issues, were signed between Serbia and the US and between Kosovo and the US, not between the two countries.

Grenell said afterwards that the agreements gave the two countries the chance to "move on" through "economic normalisation" from two decades of enmity since the Kosovo war ended in June 1999.

He described the issues between the two countries as mainly a fight about "symbolism and adjectives, and verbs, and nouns", citing the example of the strategically important Gazivoda/Ujmani...