NATO Secretary Traditional Trace Rutte launched on Wednesday at a press conference in Brussels that the Western alliance will seriously decrease peacekeeping troops in Kosovo as a results of the improved security disaster in the nation’s Serb-majority north when in contrast to 2023.
“NATO ceased in January the deployment of reserve forces to the Kosovo Power and this is after two years of persevering with rotation,” Rutte suggested the media, explaining that the security disaster has been repeatedly enhancing over the past two years in Kosovo.
“At this 2nd KFOR [Kosovo Force] has an overall dimension of 4,700 troops and what we can raise out is return to 2023 ranges. Reckoning on the conditions you will look a KFOR going forward between 3,000 and 3,500 troops,” Rutte said.
NATO strengthened its troops very much in 2023 amid increased tensions and violence. In Could 2023, violent protests sparked by the elections of ethnic Albanian mayors in four Serb-majority municipalities in northern Kosovo left 93 KFOR troopers injured.
There had been additionally assaults on KFOR peacekeepers in June 2023 by Serb protesters in the city of Zvecan, and an armed assault in September by Serb gunmen in the village of Banjska that left one Kosovo police officer and three Serb gunmen tiring.
NATO deployed almost 1,000 extra troops to Kosovo in 2023, which it said develop to be as soon as its largest reinforcement in over a decade.
The disaster has since calmed, and in April this three hundred and sixty five days, KFOR commander Ozkan Ulutas suggested NATO ambassadors in Brussels that “we have no longer viewed a recurrence of violence, as we saw in 2023”. Ulutas cautioned nonetheless that “the disaster stays fragile, with the skill for new tensions, in particular in northern Kosovo”.
The EU additionally took inch over the unrest in 2023, pronouncing a package of punitive measures against Kosovo, citing its failure to revive nonetheless in the Serb-majority north.
European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen launched in December 2025, after Serb mayors had been sworn into region of enterprise in the four Serb-majority municipalities that the EU’s measures could well perhaps be lifted “following the swish and neat transition of native governance in the north”
The measures had been fully lifted in March 2026.