Mr Zelenskyy, Whose Freedom Counts?

Zelenskyy demands the world reject Putin's claim over Ukraine, then stands in Kremlin-aligned Belgrade defending a position that leaves Kosovo trapped inside Serbia's historical claim.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has spent the years since Russia’s full-scale invasion asking the world to accept a proposition that should require little argument: a larger state does not acquire ownership of a smaller nation because of history, mythology, language, military strength or an imperial map. Ukrainians, he has insisted, possess the right to determine their own future, and Vladimir Putin possesses no legitimate authority to decide it for them. I agree. I have defended that principle not from the comfort of an editorial desk in London, but while reporting the suffering of Ukrainians since 2014 and repeatedly returning to the country after the full-scale invasion of 2022¹. But after Zelenskyy’s visit to Belgrade², where Aleksandar Vucic publicly thanked Ukraine for maintaining its position on Kosovo, I find myself confronting an uncomfortable question: does Zelenskyy actually believe the principle he has spent years asking the rest of us to defend?

I was 11 years old when Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia taught my generation of Kosovo Albanians what grand declarations about sovereignty and territorial integrity can conceal when the people living inside the disputed territory become inconvenient. I did not encounter Serbian state repression as an academic argument. I experienced the fear produced by a regime that treated the political aspirations of Kosovo Albanians as something to be crushed rather than heard. Families were displaced, communities terrorised, civilians killed and hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians driven from their homes during the war. Those memories make the spectacle in Belgrade particularly difficult to stomach, because the Serbian president standing beside Zelenskyy is not politically detached from that history. Aleksandar Vucic served as information minister in Milosevic’s government. He was part of the political machinery of the state whose conduct forced my generation to understand, far too young, what happens when the supposed sanctity of territory is elevated above the liberty and security of the people living on it.

That is why Zelenskyy’s position deserves a direct question, without the anaesthetic of diplomatic language.

• How can the president of Ukraine spend years asking the world to recognise the moral obscenity of Russia claiming historical rights over Ukrainians while his own government continues refusing to recognise Kosovo’s independence from Serbia?

• How can he demand that Ukrainians must never again be governed according to Moscow’s conception of history while accepting a diplomatic position that treats Kosovo’s separation from Belgrade as something Ukraine still cannot recognise?

The circumstances of Ukraine and Kosovo are plainly not identical, and pretending otherwise would be intellectually dishonest. Russia’s invasion and attempted annexations of Ukrainian territory are not legally equivalent to Kosovo’s declaration of independence following the wars of the 1990s, NATO intervention, international administration and years of negotiations. But that distinction makes Zelenskyy’s refusal to confront the Kosovo question more difficult to defend, not less. Kosovo is not Crimea. Serbia’s loss of control over Kosovo was not produced by Kosovo invading Serbia and annexing its territory.

The histories are profoundly different.

Zelenskyy himself has supplied the language with which his position should be examined. In his open letter to Vladimir Putin, he wrote:

“Whatever you may say about Nato, geopolitics, or the Russian language, this war is your personal choice.”

It was a powerful sentence because it stripped away the elaborate historical and geopolitical justifications with which Putin has attempted to dress an act of aggression. But the intellectual standard contained in Zelenskyy’s sentence cannot belong exclusively to him. Whatever Kyiv may say about diplomatic strategy, Serbia, international alignments or territorial integrity, Ukraine’s refusal to recognise Kosovo is also a political choice. It may be a calculated choice. It may be explained by Ukraine’s concerns about precedents Russia attempts to manipulate in Crimea and elsewhere. It may even be considered useful to Ukrainian diplomacy. But it remains a choice, and choices made in the name of national interest should not be disguised as immutable moral principles.

There is something almost surreal about watching this contradiction unfold. When Putin invokes medieval history, linguistic kinship and imperial memory to question Ukraine’s separateness, Zelenskyy rightly rejects the premise that history gives one nation permanent jurisdiction over another. Yet Serbia’s nationalist imagination has for generations treated Kosovo as something approaching sacred historical property, irrespective of the political will of the overwhelming majority of the people who live there. When Moscow insists that Ukraine’s political identity is somehow artificial, Kyiv asks the world to reject the proposition as imperial mythology. But when Kosovo says that its people cannot be returned to rule from Belgrade, Ukraine continues withholding recognition. The language changes, the geography changes and the historical circumstances differ, but an uncomfortable question survives all those distinctions: when does the political will of a people cease to matter?

For me, this is not an intellectual game. I was once the frightened Kosovan child whose future was being discussed through the language of Serbian sovereignty. Decades later, I became the journalist standing in Ukraine listening to Ukrainians describe Russian missiles, destroyed homes, occupation, displacement and the terror of not knowing whether someone they loved would survive the night. I have spent time in Ukraine year after year because I believe Ukrainian suffering deserves to be documented and because I recognise the poisonous premise beneath Putin’s war: the belief that a more powerful neighbour possesses some historical entitlement to determine the future of another people. Imagine, then, what it feels like to have documented those Ukrainian stories and subsequently watch Ukraine’s president travel to Belgrade, where a former minister of the Milosevic government can publicly thank him for maintaining a position that denies recognition to my republic.

There is a further indignity in the political arithmetic. Kosovo has stood firmly with Ukraine. It aligned itself with Western sanctions against Russia. Its institutions and much of its population embraced Ukraine’s struggle instinctively because Kosovans recognised something deeply familiar in the spectacle of a larger neighbour using history to question another people’s right to political existence. Serbia, by contrast, has spent years balancing its European ambitions against its historical relationship with Moscow and has refused to align fully with European Union sanctions against Russia. Yet it is Vucic who receives the diplomatic reassurance on Kosovo. If solidarity with Ukraine produces no reconsideration in Kyiv while Serbia’s strategic ambiguity produces continued sensitivity towards Belgrade’s central national claim, Kosovans are entitled to ask what lesson Ukraine believes smaller nations should draw from that arrangement.

The answer cannot simply be that international politics is complicated. Of course it is. Ukraine has legitimate reasons to fear any precedent Russia might cynically appropriate to justify its occupations, although the International Court of Justice concluded in its 2010 advisory opinion that Kosovo’s declaration of independence did not violate international law. Russia has nevertheless repeatedly attempted to appropriate Kosovo as rhetorical cover for its own actions. That abuse of Kosovo’s history does not make Russia’s analogy true. Nor does refusing to recognise Kosovo somehow make Putin’s annexations more illegal. International law does not become stronger by pretending fundamentally different histories are identical merely because Moscow would prefer them to be.

This is where Zelenskyy’s moral authority collides with his government’s diplomatic convenience. He has become one of the world’s most recognisable advocates of the proposition that nations are not possessions. He asks audiences across continents to understand that Ukraine cannot be traded, divided or returned to somebody else’s sphere of influence simply because Moscow believes history entitles it to such power. Yet Kosovo Albanians spent decades confronting their own version of the proposition that history could override the political will of living human beings. Zelenskyy does not have to accept every Kosovan interpretation of that history. But he cannot indefinitely demand that the world treat Ukraine’s freedom as an absolute moral imperative while refusing even to reconsider whether Kosovo might deserve recognition under a principle he invokes almost every day.

None of this changes my solidarity with Ukrainians. My anger at Zelenskyy’s position will not be transferred to a Ukrainian family sheltering from Russian missiles, a soldier defending his town or a mother waiting for news from the front. I have reported their suffering, and I will continue to regard Russia’s aggression against them as the crime that it is. Kosovo should continue standing with Ukraine because solidarity with people subjected to aggression should never become a commercial transaction in which compassion is exchanged for diplomatic recognition. Kosovans know too much about abandonment to wish it upon Ukrainians merely because their president has adopted a position we find morally indefensible.

But solidarity does not require obedience, and gratitude does not require silence. Sometimes solidarity requires telling an ally that his argument has become hypocritical. Zelenskyy wrote to Putin that Ukraine had preserved its independence and would preserve it. Kosovo did the same. He told Putin that Ukrainians were fighting for their existence. Kosovo Albanians know what fighting for political and physical survival means. He told Putin that geopolitical explanations cannot erase responsibility for political choices. The same standard must therefore be available to those of us asking questions of Zelenskyy.

I do not require Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s recognition to know that Kosovo exists. My republic does not vanish because Kyiv declines to recognise it. Kosovans are born there, vote there, build institutions there, argue about governments there and bury their dead there. What Ukraine’s position damages is not Kosovo’s existence, but the universality of Zelenskyy’s own argument. Every time he says that Ukraine cannot be treated as Russia’s historical possession, Kosovo gives him a question he has yet to answer convincingly. Every time he says that a larger neighbour cannot determine the political destiny of a smaller people, Kosovo asks where that principle ends. Every time he insists that history cannot be used to subordinate Ukrainians to Moscow, someone in my country is entitled to ask why history should continue to carry such extraordinary diplomatic weight when Serbia speaks about us.

I was 11 when Milosevic’s Serbia taught me how terrifying the vocabulary of territorial possession can become when the people inside the territory are reduced to an inconvenience. I survived that period, became a journalist and eventually found myself documenting another European nation struggling against a powerful neighbour that insists history grants it rights over somebody else’s future. That journey is precisely why I refuse to choose between supporting Ukraine and confronting Zelenskyy. I can do both. In fact, intellectual consistency requires it.

So I ask him personally:

• President Zelenskyy, if Ukraine has an unquestionable right to reject Moscow’s claim over its destiny, what principle allows Kyiv to continue treating Kosovo’s independence from Belgrade as something it cannot recognise?

• If historical possession does not determine Ukraine’s future, why should it determine ours?

• If the consent of Ukrainians matters more than Putin’s maps, why should the consent of Kosovans matter less than Serbia’s?

You told Vladimir Putin that he could stop his war. I will offer you a considerably easier proposition, you can reconsider Kosovo. You can recognise that friendship with Serbia does not require endorsing Belgrade’s claim to sovereignty over a population that overwhelmingly rejects its rule. You can acknowledge that Russia’s attempt to misuse Kosovo as justification for conquest does not transform Kosovo into Russia’s precedent. Above all, you can demonstrate that the principles you have invoked before the world are principles rather than instruments deployed only when Ukrainian interests require them.

Because a principle that becomes sacred in Kyiv and negotiable in Pristina is not universal. It is foreign policy dressed in moral language.

And if, after everything Ukraine has endured, Volodymyr Zelenskyy still cannot understand why a people once subjected to repression from Belgrade refuses to be told that its future belongs there, then the bitterest irony of his visit to Serbia is not what Aleksandar Vucic said. It is that the man who became the world’s most celebrated voice against one empire’s claim of historical ownership appears unable to recognise when another people tells him something painfully simple.

Ukraine is not Russia’s.

And Kosovo is not Serbia’s.

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1

From July to November 2022, I was stationed in Kyiv as a member of the foreign press, accredited by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence. During my time there, I diligently provided news images and reports to esteemed international news outlets, and I had the privilege of undertaking commissioned assignments from Western news agencies. — For the Pictures UK

2. The politically significant part for Kosovo is that Zelenskyy reaffirmed that Ukraine’s position on Kosovo has not changed. In practical terms, Ukraine continues not to recognise Kosovo’s independence and continues to support Serbia’s territorial integrity.

Zelenskyy reaffirmed in Belgrade that Ukraine would not change its position on Kosovo, maintaining Kyiv’s refusal to recognise Kosovo’s independence and its support for Serbia’s territorial integrity — Reuters