Who Let the PM Take That Call?
A Prime Minister duped by pranksters, cheered by fools, and protected by amateurs, Kosovo’s diplomacy reduced to farce by the very people paid to prevent it.
Albin Kurti, the Prime Minister of Kosovo, has recently found himself at the centre of a scandal that transcends the boundaries of embarrassment and dips perilously into the terrain of political negligence and diplomatic incompetence1. In a bizarre turn of events, Kurti was duped by the infamous Russian prankster duo, “Vovan and Lexus”2, under the false pretence that he was speaking to the President of Latvia3. This unmasking, public, humiliating, and deeply revealing, not only lays bare an astonishing lack of institutional due diligence but delivers a damning indictment of the people entrusted with safeguarding the credibility and stature of Kosovo’s highest political office.
At the heart of this diplomatic debacle lies a profound and disqualifying failure by Kurti’s advisory and communications team. That a sitting Prime Minister, in a region as geopolitically volatile as the Western Balkans, could be so easily ensnared by two well-known Russian pranksters is not merely a lapse, it is an…