Belgrade’s Leverage: Krasniqi’s Crypto, Zveçan’s Power

We traced Belgrade’s hybrid campaign: Vucic and his Serbian List, amplified by Escobar and Lajcak. The Krasniqi family case shows how Kosovo’s north bankrolls Moscow’s leverage over Europe.

Serbia has not abandoned the project of returning Kosovo to its orbit, it has simply exchanged uniforms for suits and artillery for narratives. What looks from Brussels like a “difficult normalisation process” is, from Prishtina, an organised strategy to keep the Republic of Kosovo incomplete, contested and therefore vulnerable. That strategy is political, military, intelligence-led and, crucially, hybrid and it is synchronised with Moscow’s broader effort to open flanks against Europe at a time when attention and munitions are tied down in Ukraine. Kosovo happens to be the flank that is least defended by Western political will.

The pattern is consistent. Belgrade negotiates, but never recognises. It signs, but does not implement. It fuels Serb boycotts in the north, then uses those boycotts to argue that Prishtina has “no legitimacy” there. It keeps parallel security, judicial, education and energy structures alive across the Ibër River so that no Kosovo government can exercise full sovereignty without being accused of “provocation”. It tolerates, arms or at least winks at militarised groups who can, as in Banjska on 24 September 2023, cross over, kill a Kosovo police officer and try to seize territory under the cover of “protecting local Serbs”. That operation, in scale and method, was too disciplined, too resourced and too politically timed to be explained away as a rogue criminal unit. It was a textbook Kremlin method, create confusion, wrap it in an ethnic-justice story, test how far NATO and the EU will go, and watch which Western capital rushes to tell Prishtina to calm down rather than to tell Belgrade to stop.

Because Serbia could not gain what it wanted through force after 1999, it built influence networks inside Kosovo’s own Albanian political scene. Our reporting on the Krasniqi family sits right in the middle of that vulnerability. When Milazim Krasniqi, with his CV¹, history and access, goes to Mitrovica and tells citizens² to “stay away” from the prime minister Kurti and the agriculture minister Peci because their presence “creates problems”, he is not offering civic advice, he is reproducing, in Albanian, the very line Belgrade and its instrument Serbian List Party push every week, ‘Prishtina is the problem,’ order comes from elsewhere. When his son, Memli Krasniqi, whose rise inside PDK was backed by the generation that made serial compromises with Serbian parallel structures, steps forward in June 2023 to echo the irritation of Gabriel Escobar and Miroslav Lajčák against the Kosovo government, he is not defending Kosovo’s Western path, he is leveraging Western pressure to weaken the only authority that has actually imposed Kosovo’s sovereignty in the north. The timing matters, he did it months before Serbian paramilitaries tried to carve out a pocket in Banjska. That is what hybrid warfare looks like in a small country, local faces carrying an external script³.

The money trail makes it even uglier. Kallxo.com reported⁴ that Memli Krasniqi