Sandra Cvetkovic is a correspondent for RFE/RL's Balkan Service.
On February 1, a ban on the use of foreign cash transactions goes into force in Kosovo -- primarily affecting the country's ethnic Serb minority, who rely on Serbian dinars on a daily basis. For some, the change affects aspects of life from collecting pensions to paying taxi fares.
After decades looking the other way, the Kosovar Central Bank announced a two-week deadline for tens of thousands of Serbs to abandon the dinar -- and their reliance on backdoor funding from Belgrade.
Serbian citizens from northern Kosovo got on buses early on December 17 to reach polling stations in Serbia. Some 120,000 voters from Kosovo are eligible to cast ballots in Serbia's snap parliamentary and municipal elections.
A project uniting linguists and students from both sides of the Balkans' most contentious border tries to show Serbs and ethnic Albanians that they share more culture than they think. As it turns out, thousands of words "do not need translation."
First mentioned in 1303, the small, multicultural, and multiethnic town of Janjevo in eastern Kosovo was once widely known for its merchants and craftsmen. Today it is dealing with population loss as its best and brightest leave the picturesque village.
Serb Mladen Perovic merely opened his doors to ethnic Serbs and Albanians alike when violence broke out this week in Zvecan and other cities. Now he's asking why that makes him a "traitor" in the eyes of Serbian ultranationalists.
Low turnout was reported in the extraordinary local elections held in predominantly ethnic Serbian municipalities in northern Kosovo on April 23. Most of the voters in RFE/RL footage from North Mitrovica and Zvecan are local Albanians, due to a boycott by the dominant Kosovo Serb party.
Kosovar authorities were already struggling with integration efforts before thousands of ethnic Serbian cops, judges, and other local officials in Kosovo quit in protest two months ago. Now they're grappling awkwardly with how to refill those posts.
Far from the unrest and increased security on both sides of the Kosovar-Serbian border, ethnic Serbs seeking jobs instead of shedding them in protest want more of Belgrade's attention.
A breakthrough on Schengen visas could not only ease the lives for Kosovar travelers but also encourage minority Serbs in Kosovo to join a system whose sovereignty they've been reluctant to endorse.
Kosovo has officially applied for membership in the Council of Europe, the continent's leading human rights organization, in an effort to seize on the recent exit of Russia.
Kosovo risks becoming a reluctant laboratory for invasive Chinese surveillance technology at the hands of neighboring Serbia, an "iron-clad" friend to Beijing.
Two crossings along the Kosovo-Serbia border have reopened to traffic as ethnic Serbian protesters removed vehicles, Kosovar special police units withdrew, and NATO troops moved in as part of an EU-mediated deal to defuse a tense standoff sparked by a dispute over vehicle license plates.
