The language of energy security served as the primary justification. Hungary’s continued dependence on Russian oil and gas was presented as an economic necessity, a shield against rising costs and instability. In reality, it entrenched a structural dependency that extended beyond economics into the political sphere. Energy became leverage, and leverage translated into influence1. The more Hungary relied on Moscow for its immediate needs, the more its leadership adopted positions that aligned with Russian in…

Read more

We should be careful with our words here. Gashi’s testimony is a testimony. It is not a court judgment. The confiscation of his phone, laptop, personal notes and even a copy of his book does not by itself prove a conspiracy. Nor does the pros…

Read more

The decision by Kosovo’s Special Prosecution to interrogate1 Shkëlzen Gashi under suspicion of “inciting division and intolerance” over a public exhibition is not merely excessive. It is a profound institutional failure. It signals, with alarming clarity, that the reflexes of power in Kosovo remain anchored not in democratic maturity, but in the political habits of intimidation that defined the country’s most fragile and dangerous years.

This is not how a confident republic behaves. This is how a captured one reacts.

At the centre of this case lies a dispute that is, by its very nature, academic. The exhibition “Massacres in Kosovo 1998–1999” is built on contested datasets, imperfect classifications and arguable interpretations. It may be flawed. It may be methodologically weak. It may even be, in parts, wrong. But none of these are crimes. They are the raw material of scholarly dispute, of p…

Read more

In the space of less than twenty four hours, Kosovo moved from a failed parliamentary session to elect a president to a presidential decree dissolving parliament and calling new elections. The decision1 by President Vjosa Osmani has now triggered a constitutional dispute that may ultimately be decided by the Constitutional Court.

The crisis began on the evening of March 5, when the Assembly of Kosovo convened to initiate the process of electing the country’s next president. According to the constitution, the parliament must hold several rounds of voting to elect a head of state.

But the session collapsed before the process could even begin.

Only sixty six lawmakers were present in the chamber, all belonging to the governing coalition led by the Self Deter…

Read more

On 4 February 2026, our newsroom published2 the result of a year long investigation, which we titled “Thaçi’s Assassination Manual”. We did not publish it as a verdict. We published it as a method, reconstructed from multiple sources, documents, broadcast material, institutional records, and interviews conducted with care. Our central argument was narrow in what it claimed, and broad in what it implied. In post war Kosovo, we wrote, power could be consolidated through a repeatable sequence, selective violence, intimidation, narrative engineering, and pressure on investigations, merging into what I called an “assassination atmosphere”. The point was not spectacle. The point was the system.

Since that publication, a question has followed me into every conversation, public and private. Why do so many different voices, from different periods, describe the same machinery? The names change. The instruments change. The underlying rhythm, in their telling, stays recognisably the same.

That question is why I sat down with Sadri Ramabaja.

To understand why his testimony matters, you need a little context. Ramabaja is not a neutral bystander. He is a veteran of Kosovo’s older clandestine politics, a former activist linked to the Popular Movement for Kosovo in the eighties and nineties, someone shaped by an era when the line between loyalty and betrayal could decide whether you lived. After the war he moved into academic and public life as a political scientist and commentator, at times a candidate associated with Vetëvendosje, at times a sharp critic of state building. But for the purpose of this piece, his profile takes on a different weight, because he has seen the system from more than one angle, as someone who says he helped imagine liberation, and as someone prosecuted in the post war era in a case known locally as “Syri i Popullit”.

For years, he has argued that his prosecution was political, an attempt to silence him through what he calls institutional fabrication. That does not make him automatically right. It does make him a particular kind of witness, informed, motivated, and shaped by direct confrontation with the state. He arrived in our conversation not as a detached observer, but as someone who insists he felt the pressure of the very atmosphere we described.

As he spoke, I recognised something familiar, the way a reader sounds when they have not merely skimmed a text, but chewed it like evidence.

“While I was reading your investigative finidngs”, he told me, “this is exactly what I had in mind, it matches the later liquidation of Hallaqi, the case of Astrit Dehari, my imprisonment, and other imprisonments later.”

Even if you accept nothing without proof, that sentence forces a harder thought. Why does one man’s personal story, and one newsroom’s research, keep converging on the same outline?

Early in the interview I asked him about SHIK, the intelligence structure long rumoured, debated, and denied in Kosovo’s post war politics. He did not claim membership. He did what a careful witness should do, he marked the limit of his certainty.

“Since I was not part of it, I cannot speak with full certainty”, he said.

But he did describe an impression formed through contact with senior officers, a rigid structure, centralised command. Then he added something darker, the possibility of sub structures that did not answer to the official leader at all, but to “someone else”. That phrase, “someone else”, is the kind of phrase that opens every door and closes none. In countries where power moves through networks, a title is not always command, and command does not always leave a title.

When I asked who, in his view, made final decisions on political eliminations, and how such decisions could be transmitted without formal traces, he did not stay abstract. He linked it to himself.

“I am one of the victims of this structure, or rather of the former head of the Republic, Hashim Thaçi”, he said.

Then came his sharpest claim, one that, if ever proven, would matter enormously. He argued that after his release from prison he received information suggesting that Kadri Veseli, often linked in public discourse to SHIK’s leadership, may not have had full knowledge of the preparations in his case, which Ramabaja says were “exclusively under Hashim Thaçi’s direction”. He described it as a double game, designed to blur responsibility. Orders are not written, he implied. Orders are distributed. They pass through people. People become dependent, or disposable.

From there, the conversation returned again and again to Behadin Hallaqi. For Ramabaja, Hallaqi is not just a name in a file, he is a moral axis, a friend, a figure he describes as intellectually prepared and politically serious within the old movement structures. He located Hallaqi’s stature in the organisational life of the Popular Movement and in internal meetings from the early nineties. He then described a dispute in 1993, during a consultation in the village of Kollare in the Kërçovë area, where he says Hallaqi was attacked harshly by Thaçi. The cause, he argued, was procedural, Hallaqi had not allowed Thaçi to participate in an earlier meeting because he was not delegated. Ramabaja reads that as the start of a vendetta.

Then he went further, and said that Thaçi accused Hallaqi of being a Serbian spy.

In a culture forged in war and clandestinity, “spy” is not merely an insult. It is a targeting device. It marks a person for isolation before anything else happens. Ramabaja claimed that in June 1998, during the war, Hallaqi was arrested under an order he believes came directly from Thaçi, presented under the cover of a “General Staff” that he argues did not exist in the way it was being invoked at that time. He said Hallaqi was taken to the detention site in Kleçkë and held for about three weeks. He also referenced a diary attributed to Murat Jashari, describing a phone conversation involving Ismet Jashari, known as Commander Kumanova, where two men brought to Kleçkë were described as spies, and named as Behadin Hallaqi and Shaban Rexhep Shala.

He described efforts to intervene through calls to Xhavit Haliti and Ali Ahmeti. He said Ahmeti responded briefly, that he had not known, thanked him for the information, and urged him not to spread it further. Ramabaja then tied Hallaqi’s fate to 11 June 1998, and to the claim that a political leadership structure was formalised on 10 June.

“It appears to me that the first work carried out by the political leadership of that staff was the liquidation of Behadin Hallaqi”, he said.

At this point, I need to be clear, especially for international readers. These are claims made by an interviewed witness. They are not court judgments. They are not proof published here. But they do present a narrative that exposes a method, which is exactly what our 4 February reporting focused on.

• First delegitimisation in the language of treason.

• Then isolation.

• Then elimination, or attempted elimination.

• Then the management of blame.

Ramabaja went further still. He claimed there were efforts to attach responsibility for Hallaqi’s disappearance to Rexhep Selimi. He described a story, told in narrow circles, in which Thaçi, Veseli, and Selimi went to Kleçkë after three weeks to retrieve Hallaqi, and removed him from detention. According to this account, Selimi then departed on another task toward Prizren, leaving Hallaqi in the hands of Thaçi and Veseli.

“In the end, responsibility for Behadin Hallaqi’s disappearance should be explained by those two people, Thaçi and Veseli”, Ramabaja told .

That claim echoes something we described in our February investigation as “narrative placement”, the deliberate positioning of guilt. In our reporting, a source who says they were close to Thaçi’s inner circle described an episode in which a Haki Imeri’s body was moved in a way intended to attribute blame to Selimi. In this alleged logic, rivals are not fought only with weapons. They are fought with files, insinuations, and decontextualised fragments fed into institutions until they return stamped with external authority. In an accountability vacuum, guilt becomes mobile, and truth becomes hostage to whoever controls the insinuation, because whoever controls insinuation controls fear.

I also raised a question that in Kosovo tends to trigger immediate debate, the role of foreign services. I mentioned our work tracing French diplomatic cables from the era of Jacques Chirac3. Ramabaja did not accept a conclusion. He accepted a possibility.

“Everything is possible”, he said, “but it must be deep and treated with competence.”

Then he shifted the emphasis to a different hinge in the story, Thaçi’s ascent to the head of the political directorate of the KLA staff. In his view, that political directorate was not merely a functional wartime structure, but a vehicle used to exclude the older Popular Movement leadership from political direction of the KLA.

“With this act, the political head of the KLA was cut off”, he said.

There is a risk, in conversations like this, of sliding into rhetoric. But beneath the rhetoric is a thesis worth examining. If a liberation movement emerges from war without a legitimate political leadership, or if that leadership is displaced internally, then post war power can fall not to the most prepared, but to the best networked, the most coercive, or the most skilled at converting war into political credit. And when war becomes credit, credit demands interest, in silence, in obedience, in fear.

Ramabaja returned again to Hallaqi’s role inside the old movement structure. He described councils organised by district, and said Prizren’s council was among the strongest, with Hallaqi at its head. He claimed Hallaqi had political support for reforms, and that this made him dangerous. He also argued, pointedly, that eliminating such figures would align with Serbian intelligence interests.

“The liquidation of these figures is entirely the first interest of Serbian services”, he told this week, linking the thought to the disappearance of Ukshin Hoti, another figure he described as someone who stirred dormant waters.

When I asked whether there was evidence that Hallaqi’s case was manipulated immediately through disinformation or organised institutional silence, Ramabaja offered an episode he considered telling. During questioning by prosecutor Sylë Hoxha, he said he was explicitly told that Hallaqi had been a Serbian collaborator.

“The first killing was done through propaganda”, he said, “by presenting him as a collaborator of Serbia.”

That idea, delegitimisation before elimination, sits at the heart of many of the accounts we have collected over the years. A bullet can kill a person. The word “traitor” can kill a person twice, once socially, then physically, because it grants permission.

This is where Ramabaja’s story intersects with our reporting beyond the war era. He described his own prosecution as part of a method that does not always require a gunman. He has laid out this argument in his defence speech4 and in his book “Liria pa heronj”. In our conversation he condensed it into three pillars, the name of Behadin Hallaqi, because Ramabaja says he edited testimonies about Kleçkë, the portrayal of him as an “ideologue” of Vetëvendosje, and the publication of his dissertation, read by some as a political platform.

Then he delivered his most serious accusation, describing as public fact the presence of an adviser registered, he claimed, as an agent of Serbia’s BIA in Thaçi’s office, and arguing that this channel shaped orders in his case.

“Hashim Thaçi imprisoned me with Belgrade’s push”, he said.

That was an allegation of the highest order, and it demanded rigorous verification. We examined the contemporaneous reporting and confirmed that the appointment did in fact take place. As reported at the time by Reporteri5, Thaçi appointed Branislav Nikolic as a political adviser. Subsequent media monitoring summaries carried by UN sources reported6 that the President later dismissed Nikolic following claims of his alleged involvement in activities directed against the constitutional order and sovereignty of Kosovo.

The record therefore shows not merely an accusation in political rhetoric, but an appointment formally made and later rescinded. Even so, the episode illuminates how coercion can move through institutions. Labels such as “enemy” and “ideologue” do not remain confined to speech. They migrate into structures of authority. Pre-trial detention becomes punishment. Delay becomes discipline. Guilt does not need to be proven in order to operate as exclusion. In that environment, violence does not disappear; it is relocated into procedure, into dossiers, into the slow pressure of confinement.

After our 4 February publication, the model we described did not remain confined to the past. It moved into the present. The response to our reporting was not primarily a rebuttal of facts. It was a sequence many Kosovars will recognise, moral framing, personal delegitimisation, and contamination with accusations designed less to be verified than to exclude. That reaction matters because it suggests the infrastructure of intimidation is not historical residue. It is a living reflex7.

Integrity requires another separation. In a serious reporting piece, you do not merge claims and facts without naming them. What can be stated publicly is that Ramabaja’s case became a subject of media debate8, and that Kosovo reporting has discussed issues such as alleged surveillance and questions around detention. He cited local investigative journalism, named lawyers, and referenced international attention he says his case attracted, including statements and advocacy by foreign figures and institutions. I am not, in this piece, independently documenting each of those elements. Where documentation exists, it belongs in the evidentiary record, not in the heat of a single narrative. The point here is more modest, his case was not small, it carried enough weight to travel beyond Kosovo’s borders, and that alone says something about the seriousness of the allegations and the level of distrust many citizens hold toward domestic justice.

When I asked him when he first understood he had become a target, he pointed to 2016. He described his home and library being ransacked ahead of elections when he was a parliamentary candidate, and said a police investigator told him it did not look like ordinary theft, but like a search for something else. He read it as a signal of permanent pursuit.

Sadri Ramabaja’s home after it was ransacked in 2016.

He then spoke of 2017, when the assassination attempt by Murat Jashari against Azem Vllasi occurred on 12 March, and claimed that his own name surfaced in portals he described as close to SHIK, along with his photograph. He alleged surveillance by intelligence officers using false identities, and claimed that professional reporting was then falsified at the top to keep him in detention. Those are grave claims. They demand grave investigation.

He also described prison conditions in ways that suggest intimidation can be psychological as well as physical. I will not reproduce the most distressing details. It is enough to say that he described episodes he believes were designed to degrade and frighten him, and he argued that accountability inside the system was treated as an inconvenience.

Why, I asked him, did Kosovo’s society stay quiet for so long?

He did not reduce it to one reason. He spoke about fear, kompromat, buying silence, economic looting, capture of justice, from investigative units to the state’s summit. He spoke of deep mistrust, including toward the Constitutional Court, which he portrayed as guarding entrenched interests. That is a political thesis, contested, but it is also a measure of something real, the depth of civic doubt. In a state where people do not believe courts can clarify political violence, truth itself becomes foreign. And the foreign is greeted either with hope, or with rage.

From there he moved to a myth Kosovo still lives with, the commander myth. He argued that the KLA’s full history has not been written, partly because of the ongoing process in The Hague. Then he gave a paradox that captures the country’s unease.

“We have left it to The Hague to bring us the foundation of the KLA’s history”, he said.

He also criticised the defence strategy around Thaçi, arguing it has sometimes protected the client at the expense of the KLA’s broader image. Here, precision matters. War crimes are not erased by speeches. They are investigated, prosecuted, proven, or refuted under legal standards. What Ramabaja appeared to be demanding was a separation between the KLA as a collective historical value, and individuals who, in his view, exploited its emblem for power and criminality.

Near the end, he placed his argument in a moral horizon. Truth, he said, is necessary to save what can still be saved of the KLA’s image. Responsibility should be individual, not tribal. The request sounds simple. In Kosovo it is heavy, because for two decades many people learned that the question itself could be dangerous. In an atmosphere where asking is treated as betrayal, silence becomes a survival skill.

In our 4 February investigation, I wrote that when a system rests on fear and narrative control, it will defend itself by making accountability look dangerous. After publication, we watched a portion of the reaction focus less on factual counter argument and more on delegitimising our team, on identity accusations, on demands for state consequences for speech. Ramabaja saw that as continuity. In Kosovo, he said, debates are not won with evidence. They are won by making the opponent socially unacceptable.

When I asked whether the truth about political killings can emerge without an international process, he was blunt about the current moment. He argued that Kosovo’s justice system, as presently structured, would obstruct such a process at any cost. But he also suggested that reforms could shift the terrain, pointing toward vetting as a future hinge. He framed Kosovo’s elections, especially 14 February 2021 and 28 December 2025, as democratic turning points. That is political interpretation, but it reveals something important, he does not believe history is closed. He believes it is still on trial.

Then he made the most direct appeal of our entire conversation, aimed at those he believes know what happened to Behadin Hallaqi.

“They should speak openly, clearly”, he said. “They have no reason to stay silent anymore.”

He added that testimony in The Hague, partial and sealed away from public view, is not enough.

“The case of Behadin Hallaqi kills the conscience of everyone who had him as a comrade and as a political leader”, he said, and especially of the old Popular Movement leadership, which he insisted still stays silent.

A small state born from war carries a recurring temptation. To confuse pride with immunity. To confuse heroism with untouchability. To confuse questioning with betrayal. In that confusion, if crimes occurred, they find shelter not only in perpetrators, but in collective fear. Honest journalism does not play judge. It plays light. It separates what is documented from what is alleged. It searches for proof. It protects sources when risk is real. It writes carefully, because a careless sentence can be weaponised by those who prefer fog.

Ramabaja’s testimony does not establish anyone’s criminal guilt. But it adds another piece to what we called, on 4 February 2026, a method. It offers an internal account from a man who says he experienced pursuit, fabrication, isolation, and risk. It describes how the label “spy” can open the road to disappearance. It describes how a penal process can function as a political instrument. It describes how fear can be sold and bought, and how silence can become currency. And above all, it returns us to the same question that has haunted Kosovo’s post war years, and now haunts our reporting.

If there are so many independent accounts, arriving from different angles, describing the same machinery, what does that mean for a society that learned, for two decades, to lower its voice whenever responsibility was mentioned?

Kosovo risks more than justice if political crimes remain unnamed and unaccounted for. It risks its moral language. If a society teaches itself that truth is a luxury, it turns itself into a hostage. And hostages, as people in this country know too well, are not always killed with weapons. Sometimes they are killed by endless waiting, by files that never open, by testimonies that remain partial, by fear passed down like an old house, with keys handed from one generation to the next.

In this long dusk of our history, where truth can feel like a relic buried under layers of institutional silence, testimony like Ramabaja’s is a shout rising from the bottom of a deep well. It does not ask merely to be heard. It asks for moral release, the kind only clean justice can provide. Kosovo cannot walk indefinitely on ground mined with nameless graves and suffocated files. A freedom fed by forgetting internal crimes eventually sickens with cynicism. Journalism has done its part, it has opened a window in the fog. Now the burden moves to conscience, and to the courage of magistrates who must prove that law is not a cloth used to wipe away the traces of power, but a blade that separates an era of intimidation from the dawn of a dignified Republic. History, that merciless judge with no statute of limitations, is waiting at the door. No media siege, and no narrative engineering, will keep it outside forever.

The purpose of the Security Fund was explicit and honest. It allowed citizens at home and in the diaspora to contribute directly to strengthening Kosovo’s defence and security capacities. It was meant to supplement a chronically underfunded security sector and accelerate the transformation of the Kosovo Security Force into a credible deterrent. In plain language it was about arming Kosovo. Not for adventure. Not for provocation. But…

Read more

The investigation framed its core idea in plain terms. It described what it called an “assassination atmosphere”, a climate manufactured so that neutralising opponents looked like necessity, and loyalty became a form of debt. It was built around a spine of public record and a layer of testimony. It named the limits of what could be proved. It insisted on the difference between allegation and documentation. It also made a choice that shaped everything that followed. It treated the pattern itself as ne…

Read more

I do not mean the ordinary reverence that societies keep for their wartime memories. I mean something more transactional, the way a flag can be held up like a receipt. You can almost hear the implied bargain. Accept the story as offered, and you will be allowed to belong. Question it, and you will be made to feel you have stepped outside the warm circle of the nation.

By the end of that month I had stopped thinking of it as commentary and started thinking of it as pressure, the soft kind that does not leave marks on the skin but can still rearrange a person’s breathing. It was not the claim itself that bothered me most, it was the confidence with which it was delivered, as though two decades of postwar reality could be erased by saying the word hero with enough force.

On 9 January 2026, I wrote what I had been carrying around in my chest and trying not to turn into a performance. I posted it on Facebook1 and then on X2, as plain as I could make it.

“Hashim Thaçi nuk është hero.”

There are sentences that land with the weight of a stone not because they are complex, but because they cut through a whole architecture of pretence. In the post, I laid out the core of what I meant. That for twenty years Kosovo had been ruled and looted. That interests aligned with Serbia had been protected and normalised inside Kosovo’s institutions. That in The Hague, Thaçi had sought to separate himself from the very war narrative that his political aura has long traded on, and that this strategy, whatever its legal logic, carries a moral cost for a society that built much of its postwar identity around collective sacrifice.

I wrote about the paradox as I saw it, and I used the kind of language that refuses to whisper. Either he lied for years about what he was, or he is lying now to protect himself. And then the line that still makes people flinch, because it names the unspoken mechanism.

That he was willing to criminalise his comrades and the liberation war in order to save himself.

Even if you disagree with me, you can feel why it touches a nerve. In Kosovo, war memory is not only memory. It is currency. It is also shelter. When ordinary people are crushed by prices, when the young leave, when cynicism becomes the most reliable export, the war remains the one story that still promises meaning. The easiest way for a political class to keep power in that climate is to keep the nation emotionally parked in the war, forever mid sentence, forever one more chant away from redemption.

Two days later, on 11 January, I wrote again3. This time the tone was less declarative and more intimate, as if I were speaking while walking beside someone, letting the thoughts arrive in order. I began with a sentence that admitted what propaganda often exploits, that human beings can understand almost anything if they are pushed into the right fear.

“I understand how some call it heroism when a politician wraps himself in the glory of war to justify a twenty year looting.”

The post turned into a kind of portrait of a country being emptied quietly, like a house robbed at night by people who swore they would guard it in daylight. I wrote about how “peace” had been used as a label to sanctify the installation of Serbian interests inside Kosovo, how truth can be drowned slowly so it does not make noise, how killings do not always come with bullets in public view but can also arrive through darkness, forgetting, mud.

And then I drew the line again, but softer, almost tender in its insistence.

“No. I do not call this heroism.”

Heroism is not looting. Heroism does not fear the free word. Heroism does not need new graves to protect a lie.

There is a reason this kind of language travels. It is not because it is perfect. It is because it speaks to a fatigue people rarely admit out loud. The fatigue of being told that the highest act of patriotism is silence. The fatigue of watching men in suits borrow the dead as decorations. The fatigue of seeing the same faces on television telling the same moral tale while the ordinary world keeps getting harder.

Later that same day, I posted a third time4, and I changed the angle. I wrote about veterans, about the years after the war, about the people who were celebrated in speeches and then abandoned in life. I cited reports and the veterans organisation’s claims that dozens of former fighters took their own lives after the war, not from Serbian bullets but from hunger, poverty, abandonment, and the inability to feed their families. I wrote about commanders building villas, building power, building a Kosovo where the fighter mattered only as décor. I wrote the sentence that made the moral frame explicit.

“Today we are asked for loyalty to crime, not justice for the dead.”

And then I wrote a line that, in Kosovo’s political climate, is treated as both sacrilege and hygiene.

“Whoever uses the name of UÇK to protect thieves is a traitor to it.”

When you write like that, you are not only stating a belief. You are touching the wiring of the country. Kosovo’s political spectrum has been shaped by a long, unresolved struggle over who owns legitimacy. For years, a certain class of men could end arguments by pointing at their war credentials, real or embellished or strategically narrated. That credential became a passport into wealth, influence, and impunity. In the background, a second Kosovo grew, the one where teachers and nurses and shopkeepers measured their lives in invoices and remittances, the one that learned to love the country while distrusting its rulers, the one that watched patriotism become a private business.

My posts were not a policy proposal. They were a refusal. And refusals do something interesting online. They create a sudden clarity that forces everyone else to choose where to stand, or at least where to perform.

Then came the reaction, and it arrived not as a conversation but as a surge.

The numbers on the screenshots tell a story of their own. Hundreds of thousands of views on one post, tens of thousands on the others, thousands of interactions, a thick wave of comments and shares, and an audience profile that leans heavily adult, with a striking concentration in the thirty five to forty four bracket, then forty five to fifty four, then twenty five to thirty four. This is not a schoolyard argument. It is the age group that carries bills, children, disappointments, and the long memory of what the nineties promised and what the two thousands delivered. It is the generation that watched the state being built and then watched it being captured.

The numbers speak when the cartoons are dismissed.

What mattered more than the numbers was the texture of the public reaction, and the way it mapped Kosovo’s political psychology in real time. There were those who leaned in, relieved to see someone say plainly what many only say in kitchens. There were those who tried to pull the discussion back into sacred territory, the old insistence that any criticism of Thaçi is a criticism of the war itself. There were those who responded with fury that sounded less like disagreement and more like panic, because panic is what you hear when a myth feels threatened.

There were also the familiar tactics that appear whenever someone tries to puncture a profitable narrative. The sudden questioning of motives. The attempts to reduce the argument to personality. The little insinuations that the critic is working for someone else. The smear of being “pro Serbia” flipped around like a knife, used not to protect the country but to protect a brand.

This is one of the deeper consequences of a society that has not fully processed its postwar traumas. It becomes easy to weaponise identity as a switch. If you criticise the wrong person, you are no longer a citizen with a view, you are an enemy. When that becomes routine, politics stops being a contest of ideas and becomes a contest of tribal alarms. It is a form of social engineering, and it produces a public that is constantly being trained to react rather than to think.

In the middle of the noise, I tried to do what I always try to do when the internet turns into weather. I read, I watched, I took notes on patterns rather than individual insults. I reminded myself that most people are not villains, they are simply tired, and tired people cling to whatever story makes them feel safe. I also reminded myself of something that Kosovo’s modern politics has proved repeatedly. When you touch the myth economy, the response is never purely emotional. It is organisational.

That is when the media response began to unfold in a way that felt less like journalism and more like enforcement.

On 12 January, Nacionale published5 an article that presented itself as a scandal, not about what I wrote, but about who liked it. A consular official in Frankfurt, Gëzim Gashi, had liked the post, then removed the like after questions were sent, and the consulate replied that the like was accidental. The framing was not subtle. A state official had touched a dangerous idea, and the system moved quickly to isolate the contact, to make it look like a mistake, to remind everyone that even a finger tap can be treated as a political crime.

The article quoted a portion of my words and complained that “no facts” were offered, while the deeper move was happening in plain sight. The move was surveillance as narrative. Who liked what. Who agreed. Who dared. It is the kind of attention that teaches a public lesson.

Do not think too loudly.

Do not click too honestly.

Do not leave traces.

When insajderi6 and paparaci7 republished the story in copy paste form, the mechanism became clearer. It was not an isolated editorial choice. It was a network behaviour, the media ecosystem moving as a unit when the central myth is challenged. The message spreads horizontally, quickly, with the same tone, as if the country’s discourse were being run through a stencil.

Then another layer arrived, the political layer, with Artan Behrami calling for the consular official’s dismissal8 and claiming that if the president and foreign minister did not act, they would prove they were on a Serbian agenda. It is a familiar trick in Kosovo, and it deserves to be named gently but firmly because it has consequences. The accusation of serving Serbia is treated as the ultimate moral weapon, yet it is often deployed not to defend sovereignty but to defend factional power.

Here is what happens psychologically when that tactic becomes normal. People stop using the language of evidence and start using the language of impurity. The public sphere becomes a place where you win not by proving your case but by staining the other person’s belonging. That is corrosive for any democracy, but especially for a small state still building confidence in its institutions. It turns politics into a permanent loyalty test, and it rewards the most theatrical accuser, not the most truthful citizen.

At this point, the story had travelled through three layers of Kosovo’s postwar structure. The citizen voice. The social media crowd. The media network. And now the political apparatus, eager to turn a Facebook like into a state scandal.

But the real question beneath the noise was older than any platform. Who gets to define what Kosovo is allowed to remember, and how.

When I wrote that Thaçi is not a hero, I was not trying to confiscate anyone’s war memory. I was trying to separate the war from the men who have used it as a shield. That separation is precisely what frightens the networks built on war legitimacy. Because once the war is not theirs to rent out, they have to answer for what they did with the peace.

And peace, in Kosovo, has been heavy. Peace has been unemployment and migration. Peace has been a state that often feels like it belongs to a handful of people. Peace has been the quiet normalisation of corruption, presented as pragmatism. Peace has been the slow training of a society to accept that justice is something you praise in speeches but do not practise when it touches powerful names.

This is why the veterans question matters so much. When former fighters are left to struggle, and some fall into despair, it is not only a social failure. It is a political revelation. It shows what the ruling myth is really for. Not to honour sacrifice, but to control it.

If the liberation war is treated as sacred, then the men who claim ownership of that sacredness can demand silence in exchange for belonging. They can say, you must not ask about property, about contracts, about political killings, about intimidation, about how wealth appeared so quickly in the hands of so few. They can say, you owe us gratitude, and gratitude means obedience.

The consequence is a society that lives in two moral realities at once. In one reality, the war is sacred and must never be questioned. In the other reality, everyone knows someone who has been cheated, threatened, pushed out of work, denied a chance because they did not have the right party tie. That split produces a deep national cynicism. People clap at ceremonies and then curse at home. They celebrate independence and then leave. They tell their children to love Kosovo, and then they tell them to get out.

When my posts went viral, I think they did so partly because they spoke directly into that split. They did not ask people to stop loving the war memory. They asked people to stop letting war memory be used to suffocate the present.

Then, as always, the counter machinery tried to shrink the argument into a manageable target. Not a debate about accountability, but a story about me.

Nacionale called me “so called journalist.” Another outlet described me as “close to power,” a phrase that in Kosovo is used not as analysis but as a warning. These labels do not aim to clarify. They aim to pre condition the reader emotionally. If the writer is framed as illegitimate, you do not have to engage the claim. You can stay inside the comfort of the myth.

This is where Kosovo’s media crisis becomes not only an ethical issue but a democratic one. When media outlets operate as extensions of political and economic networks, the public is left without a shared set of facts. People retreat into their camps, each camp with its own outlets, its own heroes, its own villains. The country becomes less a civic space and more a collection of competing tribes, each convinced that the other is not only wrong but dangerous.

And that is exactly the environment where external actors thrive. If a society cannot agree on what is true, it becomes easier to push it. If institutions are distrusted, it becomes easier to bypass them. If journalists are routinely smeared as enemies, it becomes easier to intimidate them. In the Balkans, where Serbia and Russia both understand the strategic value of narrative warfare, a fractured Kosovo is not an accident. It is a prize.

This is why the Hague question sits in the background of my entire latest timeline. The Kosovo Specialist Chambers, whatever one thinks of its politics or its imperfections, represents a challenge to the postwar impunity system. It says, in effect, that even the highest war names might be judged, that the war aura does not automatically translate into moral exemption.

A network that fears accountability will inevitably try to delegitimise the mechanism of accountability. It will say the court is anti UÇK. It will say it is a Serbian narrative. It will say it is an insult to the war. It will try to collapse the distinction between judging individuals and judging the cause. That collapse is not a misunderstanding. It is strategy.

In my longer work, I have described attempts to undermine the court9, smear prosecutors, intimidate witnesses, and coordinate narratives. I am not going to reproduce my articles line by line, because the point here is not to drown the reader in an archive. The point is to show the shape of what unfolded around these January posts, and what that shape reveals about Kosovo’s political ecosystem.

What unfolded was a miniature demonstration of a larger system.

First, a citizen voice punctures a myth.

Then, a crowd reacts, revealing the underlying moral tension of the society.

Then, media networks scan the crowd, looking for leverage, turning a like into a scandal.

Then, politicians escalate the scandal, framing it as treason or foreign agenda.

At each stage, the goal is not clarity. The goal is control.

And the most chilling part is how ordinary the machinery has become. Surveillance dressed as reporting. Moral accusations used as party weapons. Institutions dragged into online theatre. The public trained to view dissent as betrayal.

When I stand back far enough, I can see the country’s political spectrum not as a left right chart but as a struggle between two instincts.

One instinct is civic. It wants institutions, accountability, a state that belongs to citizens rather than clans. It is impatient with myth when myth is used to excuse theft. It is willing to honour the war while still asking what was done with the peace.

The other instinct is transactional. It wants power protected. It wants the war to remain a moral shield that cannot be penetrated. It treats the state as spoils. It is comfortable with a media ecosystem that performs loyalty rather than scrutiny. It thrives on fear, because fear is cheaper than persuasion.

The tragedy is that both instincts often exist inside the same person. A man can love the war memory and still suspect the war elites. A woman can resent corruption and still feel anxious when a sacred name is criticised. That inner conflict is what makes Kosovo so vulnerable to manipulation, and also what makes it so capable of sudden moral clarity when the right words arrive at the right time.

My words arrived at a moment when the myth economy was already strained. People feel the cost of living. They feel the humiliation of needing a cousin abroad to send money. They feel the anger of watching officials live well while public services remain thin. They feel the insult of being told that asking questions is disloyal.

So when I wrote “heroism is not looting,” it did not land as poetry. It landed as recognition.

And recognition is dangerous to systems built on controlled memory. Because once a society recognises its own manipulation, it becomes harder to manipulate it the same way again. That is why the response becomes personal. That is why the smear arrives. That is why the surveillance angle emerges. That is why the consular like becomes headline material. It is not about the like. It is about signalling.

Look what happens when you touch this.

Look how quickly we can make you regret it.

And then I sat and thought. If I wanted to keep the reader beside me, as if I am speaking quietly while the storm rages elsewhere, then the final part of the story is not the outrage. It is the choice I made, and the choice Kosovo keeps being asked to make.

I did not respond by retreating into silence. I responded by continuing to write, by placing the events into a timeline, by showing the mechanics. I treated the reaction itself as evidence of the system I were describing. I said, in effect, if a single post can trigger surveillance, copy paste amplification, and political calls for dismissal, then perhaps the posts touched something true about how power behaves.

This is one of the strange gifts of social media, even in its ugliness. It accelerates cause and effect. It showed me, within days, the nervous system of a country. It showed me which myths are guarded by institutions, which names are protected by networks, which criticisms are allowed to pass quietly and which ones trigger alarms.

And it reveals, in the most human way, what happens to the ordinary person watching all this. They learn that politics is not only about laws, it is also about atmosphere. They learn that silence is rewarded. They learn that speaking can cost you friends, opportunities, safety, peace of mind. They learn that even a like can become a liability.

A society that teaches its citizens to fear a like is not stable. It is brittle.

Britain has a phrase for this kind of thing, though it is usually said about families rather than states.

We do not talk about that.

Kosovo has spent years not talking about certain things, not because people do not know, but because knowing is not the same as being able to say. When you write plainly, you widen the gap between what people privately know and what they are publicly allowed to say. That gap is where political change begins, and also where backlash breeds.

If there is a consequence worth naming gently, it is this. Every time a media outlet turns scrutiny into mockery, every time a politician turns dissent into treason, every time a network turns a moral argument into a personality attack, the country becomes a little more exhausted. And exhausted societies do not build strong institutions. They look for saviours. They cling harder to myths. They become more vulnerable to foreign games, because foreign games always offer simple stories.

The alternative is slower and less cinematic. It is the work of separating the war from the profiteers. Separating honour from impunity. Separating patriotism from obedience. Letting people love their country without having to love the men who captured it.

That is why my January posts mattered, regardless of who agrees with every line. They did not merely accuse a man. They challenged a method. They challenged the method of borrowing the dead to protect the living who have done harm. They challenged the method of treating criticism as betrayal. They challenged the method of using Serbia as a rhetorical ghost to silence domestic accountability.

When I say “Kosova lives,” I am not only saying Kosova lives. I am saying it can live without false heroes. It can live without the moral blackmail that tells citizens they must accept theft as the price of independence. It can live with a more adult patriotism, the kind that insists on dignity not only in war memory but in everyday governance.

And perhaps the most revealing detail in the whole timeline is the simplest one, the one that still makes me pause because it is so perfectly Kosovo.

People are watching, reacting, arguing, taking sides, but not moving towards deeper reading, deeper evidence, deeper inquiry. That is not a moral failure of the audience. It is a symptom of a society trained to experience politics as a spectacle, not as a responsibility. It is what happens when citizens are kept in a permanent emotional state, always outraged, always defensive, rarely empowered.

If Kosovo is to shift, it will have to shift there, from performance to participation. From myth guarding to institution building. From tribal reflex to civic patience.

That change does not begin in parliament. It begins in language. In the refusal to let the loudest network define what is allowed to be true. In the willingness to say, calmly, without theatrical hatred, “no, I do not call this heroism.”

And then to keep saying it, even when the room gets cold.

I watched the reaction unfold the way it always does in this region, not first through institutions, but through posts. Edi Rama moved quickly. He did not speak in policy. He spoke in sentiment, seasonal symbols, and the oldest form of plausible deniability in Albanian politics, a blessing that sounds like solidarity while leaving him room to do the opposite tomorrow.

“I congratulated the re elected Prime Minister of Kosovo for the meaningful victory and I …

Read more

Spies in the White House? Russian agents in the US1.

It is the sort of title that ought to feel sensational—tabloid bait for a bored afternoon. It doesn’t. The documentary lands like a smoke alarm in a sleeping house, too shrill to ignore, too plausible to dismiss. Its witnesses, former FBI counter-intelligence leads, KGB veterans turned contrarians, prosecutors who followed money trails that never quite end, do not speak like ideologues. They speak like people in possession of a pattern.

That pattern begins long before the tanks rolled toward Kyiv on 24 February 2022, and even before the kompromat folklore of Moscow hotel rooms. It stretches back to the late Cold War, to the KGB’s doctrine of “illegals,” to a checklist of exploitable traits, vanity, greed, sexual risk that might, over time, bend a Western figure of influence into something more useful, not a marionette, exactly, but a predictable shape in a set piece. The documentary’s narrative is not ultimately about one American politician, however theatrically present he is within it. It is about an ecosystem of services, oligarchic finance, intermediaries, and cut-outs built to undermine Western unity by design.

Luke Harding’s earlier reporting2 pulls the lens back further. Through Christopher Steele’s career arc, MI6 Moscow hand, Litvinenko investigator, later the compiler of the dossier that detonated into the American bloodstream in 2016, we trace the re-consolidation of a post-Soviet security state that never truly left the room. There was a regime change, there was not a systems change. The services persisted, so did their reflexes, we are the masters here, we can do what we please.

Thread the DW allegations and Harding’s reporting together, and the outline hardens. This is not a series of coincidences. It is a strategy, elegant in its deployment, ruthless in its ambition executed across decades with a single lodestar fracture, paralyse, hollow, normalise. The ground is already shaking. The question is whether we still have the courage to admit what we are standing on.

Share

Anatomy of the Threat.

The power networks

Read more

Read more

In a career that ran through Radio Free Europe, CSIS, CEPA and the Jamestown Foundation, Bugajski became a bridge between rigour and urgency. His output columns, testimonies, long-form studies, was prolific, but volume…

Read more

Serbia has made its choice. President Aleksandar Vucic presides over a government increasingly tied into Moscow’s energy arteries, Beijing’s defence supplies, and Kremlin-linked intelligence networks. Belgrade’s theatre of “balancing” between East and West is just that: theatre. The Rafale jets bought from France, or flirtations with EU membership, are bargaining chips to stall Western pressure while Serbia entrenches itself ever deeper in the Russian orbit. To call this “neutrality” is to indulge a lie.

By contrast, Kosovo stands alone in the Western Balkans as th…

Read more

But the record is clear: his dismissal follows the scrutiny that The Gunpowder Chronicles pursued relentlessly for months, exposing a tenure that stands as an embarrassment to Germany, a betrayal of the Vienna Convention3, a betrayal of Germany’s own code of diplomatic conduct4, and a direct affront to the principles of democracy, rule of law, and press freedom in Kosovo.

How the Record Was Built

From July to August 2025, our newsroom documented in painstaking detail a series of interventions by Mr. Rohde that no diplomat should have made:

• On Kosovo’s sovereignty: He publicly urged lawfully elected mayors to vacate their offices and called for special police to withdraw from municipal buildings in the north, statements indistinguishable from direct interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state5.

• On parliamentary paralysis: He suggested legi…

Read more

On the surface, both rulings are presented as procedural housekeeping: the commissions, it is said, had not properly grounded their refusals in statute and risked disenfranchising minorities. But to reduce these cases to box-ticking is to miss the wider reali…

Read more

On August 21, Kosovo’s Central Election Commission (CEC)1 refused to certify the Serbian List, the Belgrade-directed party that has dominated Serb politics in Kosovo for a decade. The decision followed the revelation by Vetëvendosje members that many Serbian List candidates simultaneously hold posts in Serbia’s so-called “parallel institutions” in Kosovo, illegal structures long accused of undermining the state.

Two commissioners voted for certification, two against, and seven abstained.

The result: Serbian List blocked.

The response was immediate.

From Prishtina, Justice Minister Albulena Haxhiu called the move “a victory for democracy,” arguing that Serbian List2 is not a civic party but the extended arm of Aleksandar Vucic and Milan Radoicic, the latter having openly admitted to orchestrating the terrorist attack in Banja in September 20233.

From Belgrade, Foreign Minister Ma…

Read more

Read more

There is, to be sure, a genuine danger. Iran’s theocratic regime is hostile to Israel, funds armed proxies such as Hezbollah and the Houthis, and is strategically positioned to inflict harm. Israeli civilians are indeed under threat, and their fear is real. However, this reality cannot be disentangled from another, equally pressing one: that the Israeli state, led by a government with diminishing international trust, has consistently distorted the nature and scope of that threat most egregiously in its relentless insistence, over the course of nearly three decades, that Iran is perpetually on the brink of developing nuclear weapons.

This claim has not only been wrong, it has been repeatedly, demonstrably false1. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving figurehead of this narrative, has made a career of predicting Iran’s imminent nuclear breakout. In 1996, he confidently asserted that Iran would be capable of producing a nuclear bomb within "three to five years" without importing any materials. In 2006, he warned the US Congress, "Ladies and Gentlemen, time is running out," and declared that Iran would be capable of producing 25 nuclear bombs annually within a decade. In 2012, he insisted they were "six months away" from having 90% of the enriched uranium necessary for an atomic bomb. Again in 2015, before the UN Security Council, he warned that Iran was "weeks away" from acquiring weapons-grade material. And still again in 2018, he told CNN that Iran had the know-how to "make a bomb very quickly." As recently as 12 June 2025, Netanyahu repeated his refrain: "If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time. It could be a year, it could be within a few months."

Subscribe now

Yet, despite these perennial alarms2, often delivered with breathless urgency and theatrical flair, not a single prediction has materialised. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the global authority on nuclear verification, has repeatedly stated there is no conclusive evidence that Iran is actively developing a nuclear weapon3. Iran’s enrichment of uranium, while provocative and potentially destabilising, remains within the technical limits of reversibility and has not crossed the line into actual weaponisation. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)4, which Israel vehemently opposed, succeeded in dramatically curbing Iran’s nuclear activities under strict inspections, until it was unilaterally undermined by the United States under Donald Trump’s administration, with tacit Israeli approval5.

Meanwhile, Israel, a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal believed to contain over 80 warheads6. It refuses inspections, resists disarmament talks, and yet insists that Iran must be bombed for a programme it has never proved to exist. This is not a principled stance, it is geopolitical hypocrisy dressed as moral clarity.

You're reading a free preview of Gunpowder Chronicles.
This piece continues into Israel's unprovoked aggression, the collapse of global sympathy, and the dangerous rise of authoritarian ambition in Netanyahu’s Israel.
Subscribe now to access the full piece and support independent, unflinching journalism.

Read more

This is my fourth year returning to a nation the West said it would never forsake. What I see is not the heroism of tidy speeches, nor the logic of strategy rooms, it is the broken back of a people left to fight a Goliath while the Davids of the free world hold on to their slings and whisper of logistics.

Lviv, closest to the European Union, should have been a sanctuary. A promise. In 2022, it was emptied out and boarded up, cardboard where windows should be, humanity hiding behind barricaded doors. And yet, there was spirit. A pulse. People would offer you shelter before you asked. They would give before being given to.

By 2023, that spirit had matured into something dangerously hopeful. The people had heard the West’s promises. They believed in words, in laws, in alliances. There was laughter in the cafés again. A belief that help was coming, that Europe and America were not merely onlookers but comrades.

Then came 2024. Neutrality seeped into their bones like winter. A look passed between strangers, not of solidarity, but of resignation. That slow corrosion of the soul is something no army can stop once it begins. And now, in 2025, I walk among them once again and what I see is nothing short of despair made human.

The faces I once knew are gaunt. Their light has dimmed, their eyes hollow with grief and fatigue. These are not simply Ukrainians. They are software engineers, architects, artists, civil servants, fathers, daughters. And they are being devoured. Not just by Russian artillery, but by Western indifference.

I met a civil engineer, a friend of years, who earns less than $1000 a month. The same job in Berlin or Brussels would earn him nearly €4,000. And yet he rebuilds what Russian bombs erase. Another acquaintance, an electrical engineer, earns a paltry €800 while paying rent for a flat to replace the home he lost. His parents are sick. The state has nothing left to give him. Neither, it seems, does the world.

Corporations, those polished engines of “Western values” pay Ukrainian workers a fraction of what they would in Milan or Manchester. This isn’t humanitarian aid. This is economic colonialism. Exploitation clothed in capitalist compassion. Ukraine, the brave, has become Ukraine, the bargain.

And yet, the greatest betrayal is not economic, it is moral. It is the betrayal of promises made and abandoned. Western leaders, former President Biden, who delivered words without will; Donald Trump, Putin’s ventriloquist dummy and a convicted felon now squatting in the White House; Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer, whose silence echoes louder than bombs; President Macron, master of performative empathy; and Ursula von der Leyen, the EU’s technocratic ghost of compassion, all parade themselves as defenders of democracy while letting Ukraine bleed into the soil. They wear Savile Row suits, ride in million-euro motorcades, and issue declarations as if diplomacy were a theatre. They have failed a people who were not just promised support, they were incited to believe in it. Not once, but repeatedly.

In 2014, Ukrainians overthrew Viktor Yanukovych, believing the West would stand with them. Instead, Crimea fell. In 2022, a full-scale invasion shocked the world and still the West hesitated. Weapons were drip-fed like morphine to a dying man. Enough to ease the pain. Never enough to heal.

What has the West done?

It has declared press conferences, not victories. It has issued statements, not air defences. It has sent dollars, but no decisive support. It has performed theatre while Ukraine bleeds out in the wings. This is not policy. It is cowardice dressed in protocol.

Western capitals are full of dry-eyed politicians who boast of resolve while avoiding risk. Who speak of unity, but fear the cost of action. They have turned Ukraine into a war that can’t be won and won’t be lost, a war sustained just enough to ensure that peace never arrives. A war that is not allowed to end, because ending it would require courage.

And the Ukrainian people?

They are imprisoned by their own patriotism. Men cannot leave. Soldiers are spent. Even generals are weeping, quite literally weeping, because they lack what their allies promised. Ammunition. Defence. Dignity.

It is difficult to say this, but I must. If this betrayal continues, Ukrainians, desperate, exhausted, and disillusioned may turn Eastward. Not from ideology, but from isolation. Not from love of Russia, but from abandonment by Europe. The moral catastrophe would not be theirs. It would be ours.

We in the West like to tell ourselves we are on the side of freedom. But freedom without sacrifice is just rhetoric. As a journalist, I walk with the people. I see their funerals. I hold the hands of survivors. I witness what the polished corridors of Brussels, Paris, London and Washington have chosen to ignore.

The next time a Western leader claims we are “doing everything we can,” ask: are we? Or are we merely doing enough to feel clean while leaving Ukrainians to the slaughter?

I am ashamed. Ashamed not of the Ukrainians, but of the institutions I report for. The democracies I was taught to believe in. They do not represent my values. They do not carry my conscience. If Ukraine falls, not just its borders but its spirit, the West will be guilty not of negligence, but of betrayal.

And history, though often late, does not forget.

Support Independent Journalism

Gunpowder Chronicles is now available through subscription-only access, with both free and paid options. Your support helps sustain fearless, independent reporting.

☑ Donate | ☑ Subscribe | ☑ Share

Edi Rama, the towering statesman-turned-showman, secured what officialdom called a "historic" fourth term in power1. With 52 percent of the vote and 82 seats in the 140-seat parliament, the Socialist Party claimed victory amid allegations of vote buying, abuse of public office, and systemic intimidation. The opposition cried foul; …

Read more