When Tirana Forgets Kosovo: Albania’s Misstep with Grenell
Spiropali’s embrace of Grenell, under Djuric’s silent shadow, marks Albania’s betrayal of Kosovo, dressing complicity with Belgrade’s Kremlin-fed lies in the costume of diplomacy.
On 25 September 2025, Albania’s new foreign minister, Elisa Spiropali, posted a smiling photo-op from New York: “A great meeting yesterday with President Trump’s Special Envoy for Special Missions, Richard Grenell,” she wrote1, tagging #UNGA80 and hailing the “strengthening” of 🇦🇱–🇺🇸 ties. The image did more than advertise a diplomatic meet-and-greet. It placed Tirana, on the second anniversary of the Banjska attack in northern Kosovo, in the same warm frame as a political operative who has spent years ingratiating himself with Belgrade, attacking Prishtina, and courting nationalist forces across the region. The optics were not accidental; they were a tell.
If this were an isolated faux pas, it would be forgettable. It isn’t. Taken in sequence, Albania’s posture under Edi Rama has travelled from strategic ambiguity to something approaching strategic alignment with Belgrade, an alignment that, in 2025, is inseparable from the Kremlin’s interests in the Western Balkans. The consequences are not abstractions. They are measured in a murdered Kosovar police sergeant’s name Afrim Bunjaku, and in the impunity enjoyed by Milan Radoicic, the Serb power-broker who publicly claimed responsibility for the Banjska raid and now lives freely in Serbia2. They are measured in the familiar choreography of pressure on Prishtina, indulgence for Belgrade, and euphemisms in Brussels.
This is not the stance of a state acting as Kosovo’s natural ally. It is the behaviour of a government that has decided, piece by piece and year by year, to treat Serbia’s preferences as the organising principle of its Balkan diplomacy. It is also—let us be plain—how a NATO country drifts into assisting a Kremlin-aligned strategy by other means.
What happened at Banjska, and why the date matters?
On 24 September 2023, dozens of Serb gunmen ambushed Kosovo police near Banjska, killed Sgt Bunjaku, then barricaded themselves in a monastery before being dislodged. The episode was the gravest escalation since Kosovo’s independence, and it carried signatures: planning, coordination, sanctuary across the border, and a political handler who later stepped forward. Two years on, Kosovo has indicted 45 suspects3. Serbia has extradited none. Radoicic, who admitted involvement, was detained for a day and is at large in Belgrade. The EU and UK speak of accountability; Belgrade offers delay. This is the backdrop to Ms Spiropali’s embrace of Mr Grenell: not “business as usual,” but an anniversary of unfinished justice.
The Grenell problem by the record, not the rumour.
Richard Grenell4 is not a neutral actor in Kosovo–Serbia politics. In February 2025, Germany’s FAZ reported5 him urging Kosovars to vote out Albin Kurti, an explicit foray into another country’s election. His interventions reprise a 2020 playbook that European lawmakers flagged in their mapping of disinformation in the Western Balkans: amplification, pressure, theatrics of consensus. Grenell’s own résumé carries more than ideological zeal. ProPublica6 and The Washington Post7 documented undisclosed foreign consulting six-figure payments and advocacy favourable to a Moldovan oligarch later sanctioned by the U.S., and work tied to a foundation funded almost entirely by Viktor Orbán’s government. These are not Balkan whispers; they are public records. And in February 2023, Belgrade rewarded Grenell with a top state decoration. This is the man Albania’s foreign minister chose to platform on Banjska’s anniversary week.
Tirana’s long pivot: a chronology that strips the euphemisms
2018–2019: The “mini-Schengen” overture: In the name of regional integration, Rama champions what becomes “Open Balkan”, rolled out with Belgrade while Kosovo is sidelined. The gesture flatters Serbia’s preferred framing, technical economics over hard sovereignty and teaches a lesson: Prishtina’s objections can be priced in. (The sequencing matters: it normalises bypassing Kosovo on a structural file and rebrands it as pragmatism.)
2023: Banjska and the neutralising instinct: In the aftermath of a cross-border paramilitary incursion, Tirana’s line is process and “de-escalation,” not the moral clarity Kosovo needed from its closest kin. The language is surgical: speak of calm, not aggression; of dialogue, not extradition.
2023: The Association draft: Rama touts a personal blueprint for a Serb-majority municipalities’ association, foisting an external draft into an already fraught constitutional space, again privileging form over the substance of sovereignty.
2023: A sensitive appointment in Tirana: Vlora Hyseni, dismissed in 2021 from Kosovo’s intelligence service under classified provisions, surfaces in Albania, then is named director of SHISH8. In any EU capital, appointing a recently dismissed foreign intelligence official to run the domestic agency would trigger parliamentary inquests. In Tirana, it barely raised a ripple9. The fact remains: Hyseni leads Albania’s spy service today. Whatever the untold story of her dismissal, the observable fact of her role is enough to chill trust in Prishtina.
2024–2025: A metronome of indulgence for Belgrade: As Kosovo pushes cases tied to Banjska through its courts, Serbia stages a familiar pantomime, investigate, delay, release. Brussels urges “constructive steps”; Belgrade buys time and weapons10. Tirana, meanwhile, cultivates its image as regional convener while never truly breaking ranks with Vucic on the questions that bite: accountability for Banjska and the hard conditionality Serbia understands.
September 2025: The Grenell embrace: Spiropali becomes foreign minister on 19 September. Within a week, she is on social media praising a meeting with Grenell during UNGA, an anointment of her portfolio with the imprimatur of a man who, weeks after Banjska in 2023, would go on to receive Serbia’s Order of the Serbian Flag11 and who, in 2025, was again publicly campaigning against Kosovo’s elected leader12. You can call this a misread of optics. Or you can call it what it looks like: a signal.
And in the same photograph, visibly present yet conspicuously unmentioned, stands Serbia’s foreign minister Marko Djuric, a figure whose disinformation narratives, including false accusations that Kosovo is carrying out an “ethnic cleansing” campaign against Serbs, continued even after the Kremlin-inspired Banjska attacks, an operation orchestrated by Serbia to flood the world with lies and pre-justify a Moscow-styled full-scale assault on Kosovo. The photograph appears to have slipped out from Spiropali’s PR handlers without acknowledgment of Djuric’s presence; Djuric himself has not publicised any meeting with Spiropali. This mutual silence suggests not accident but design, a tacit agreement to conceal, leaving the question: what exactly are they hiding?
Albania’s alignment by accumulation
One meeting does not define a foreign policy; a decade of decisions does.
Albania’s pattern is cumulative:
Substituting “stability” for sovereignty: By blessing initiatives that marginalised Kosovo in the name of regional integration, Tirana taught Belgrade that Prishtina’s status could be treated as a negotiable add-on.
Elevating process over accountability: After Banjska, Rama’s government defaulted to the language of balance even as the perpetrators evaded Serbia’s courts. That language soothing in Brussels lands in Mitrovica as abandonment13.
Normalising cross-pressures on Kosovo’s institutions: The unilateral promotion of an Association model, the public tut-tutting of Prishtina’s domestic decisions, the indulgence of Belgrade’s dilatory instincts each move, individually defensible to a Western ear, aggregates into a strategy that weakens Kosovo’s hand and emboldens Serbia’s.
Taking reputational bets on compromised actors: No serious Western official presently treating the Balkans with care considers Mr Grenell a neutral broker. ProPublica and The Washington Post did not invent their filings. Belgrade did not fabricate his medal. When Albania’s top diplomat chooses Grenell as her first marquee handshake at UNGA, she borrows his baggage and sends her neighbours a message about Tirana’s judgement.
Why this helps the Kremlin without a single Russian flag?
Moscow’s Balkan strategy is the art of the second-best: it does not need to conquer to win; it needs to paralyse. Serbia is the hinge. When Belgrade evades consequences for extraterritorial violence; when it buys French jets and Chinese air defences while deepening energy dependence on Gazprom; when it can count on regional interlocutors to launder its behaviour as “balancing,” the Kremlin’s objective is served. A destabilised, doubt-ridden Kosovo; an EU that cannot enforce conditionality; a NATO presence that must be reinforced all of it cheapens Western leverage.
Tirana’s choices have not created this landscape. But they have made it easier for Belgrade to navigate and for Moscow to exploit.
The Grenell–Belgrade–Tirana triangle, in plain terms
Belgrade’s incentive: avoid accountability for Banjska; keep pressure on Kosovo; harvest Western indulgence while shopping for arms and gas.
Grenell’s role: rhetorically discipline Prishtina; tell Kosovars the “international community” is against their prime minister; cultivate Belgrade as a grateful stage. Germany’s FAZ documented the 2025 iteration.
Tirana’s contribution: legitimise the messenger; absorb the reputational cost; reassure Western audiences that this is “engagement.”
It is, in sum, a division of labour.
The case against Albania’s course scathing because the facts are.
First, Albania has a special burden. Kosovo is not just a friendly neighbour; it is kin by language, identity and history, a state rescued in no small part by Albanians’ own sacrifices. To answer the murder of a Kosovar policeman at Banjska with studied neutrality is not maturity; it is moral misdirection.
Second, Albania is a NATO member. It knows what hybrid pressure looks like and what impunity breeds. When Belgrade refuses to prosecute or extradite men it shelters, a NATO capital’s job is to sharpen conditionality, not soften it with photographs and euphemisms.
Third, Albania is an EU aspirant. Appointing as intelligence chief a recently dismissed official from a neighbouring service, whatever the sealed reasons for her removal would trigger a political firestorm in any member state. In Tirana it drew a shrug. That is a standards problem.
Fourth, platforming Richard Grenell is not a victimless flourish. The documented record of undisclosed foreign consulting and the public decoration from Serbia are not partisan talking points; they are corroborated facts that go to credibility. Kosovo has lived with the consequences of his “special missions.” Albania’s foreign minister just gave him a new one: Albania’s imprimatur.
What responsible Albanian politics should do now?
Albania’s political class cannot outsource this course correction to Brussels. It must do three things on its own initiative.
Draw a red line on Banjska: Parliament should mandate an unambiguous position: no high-level political theatre with Belgrade’s favourites until Serbia cooperates on Banjska, beginning with effective steps to bring Radoicic and named suspects into court. Anything less tells Prishtina that justice is negotiable14.
Rebuild institutional trust with Kosovo: Establish a structured, public security dialogue with Prishtina, minister to minister on intelligence standards, data protection and counter-disinformation. Where Tirana’s choices have chilled trust (and they have), Tirana must over-correct with transparency. The SHISH leadership question will not disappear; sunlight is the minimum.
End the choreography of appeasement: On regional platforms, Albania should condition its sponsorship of “integration” schemes on verifiable steps by Serbia: energy disentanglement from Gazprom; cooperation with Kosovo’s prosecutors; cessation of proxy media warfare against Prishtina. If Paris and Berlin wish to reward Belgrade absent these things, let them own it. Tirana should not.
To Albania’s opposition and civil society: name the capture.
It is fashionable to call this “realism.” It is nothing of the sort. It is a captured vocabulary: “balance” that tilts, “dialogue” that defers, “process” that paralyses. Albanian political forces who see the Rama government for what it has become, a Belgrade-accommodating administration in the moments that count should say so without euphemism, and they should legislate constraints on the executive’s freedom to launder those choices as statecraft.
Accountability begins with naming. The photograph in New York is a small thing. The alignment it reveals is not.
Elisa Spiropali is foreign minister as of 19 September 2025. Her first week on the job featured a curated meeting with Richard Grenell at UNGA and a caption about “strengthening ties.” In the week Kosovo remembered the officer murdered at Banjska, Belgrade’s favoured American received a fresh Albanian seal of approval. No amount of diplomatic varnish covers that meaning.
Albania can still choose a different story: one that treats Kosovo’s security as its own, that insists on accountability from Belgrade, and that stops confusing flattering optics for statecraft. Until it does, the Kremlin wins by the oldest Balkan method of all without showing up, it gets exactly what it needs.
Kosovar police surround a village after Serb gunmen storm a monastery in violence that has killed 4 — AP.
Kosovo in Crisis: Is Grenell Engineering Another Political Coup?
From diplomacy to disinformation, Grenell resurfaces, fuelling chaos in Kosovo’s elections with the same tactics that toppled Kurti’s government in 2020. — The GPC I Unit.
Richard Grenell did not disclose payments for advocacy work on behalf of a Moldovan politician whom the U.S. later accused of corruption. — ProPublica.
Richard Grenell’s paid consulting included work for U.S. nonprofit funded mostly by Hungary - Washington Post.
The Spy Who Wasn’t Vetted
A fired Kosovar spy now leads Albania’s intelligence, sparking fears over loyalty and foreign sway as Edi Rama enters a fourth term, has the shadow state overtaken the real one? — The GPC I Unit.
Serbia After Banjska: Guns, Gas, and Russian Leverage
Two years after Banjska, Serbia is more militarised, energy-bound to Russia, and reliant on Moscow’s security, while Western responses remain declaratory, fragmented, and strategically hesitant. — The GPC Politics.
Grenelli is honored in Serbia by Vuçiqi, mentions Hashim Thaçi — KOHA Ditore.
Vucic presents Richard Grenell with Order of the Serbian Flag, 1st class: You are a friend of Serbia — Telegraf.rs
How Richard Grenell Became Kosovo’s Unofficial Opposition
Richard Grenell’s intervention in Kosovo’s elections exposes his role as a political enforcer, pushing private interests over national sovereignty under the guise of American diplomacy. — The GPC Balkan Watch.