The Price List

Europe can impose costs. Serbia has learned what raises them. Albania has not learned what happens to an applicant that never does.

By Ardit Rada (Tirana)

On the afternoon of 1 September, at a press conference in Berlin, Germany’s interior minister stated the grounds on which the Federal Republic held Russia responsible for the explosive drone found on the cargo apron at Leipzig/Halle in August: the police investigation, the pattern of the offences, the findings of the intelligence services. The foreign minister then announced that the Russian consulate general in Bonn would close on 18 September. In Brussels, Kaja Kallas described the incident as one of a growing number of “kinetic hybrid” attacks and said the next sanctions package would be the widest yet.

The next morning Jasmin Mujanović, a Bosnian-born political scientist whose two books on the region are read in Washington and Brussels, published a post arguing that the Union and its key capitals “are unable to respond to Russia’s growing attacks on their own security” because the Union “was founded on an almost ontological rejection of war and violence.” A bloc that could not deal with Dodik or Vučić, he wrote, would not stand up to Putin or Xi; “it’s not the same” was what weakness said when asked to explain itself.

The two events sit awkwardly together. A consulate closure is a modest response and it came four weeks after the fact, but it is a response, and it was ordered by the capital Mujanović names. Whatever the Union’s incapacity is, it lies somewhere more specific than an inability to act against Russia, and the month just ended supplies enough material to find it.

Serbia’s August began with a threat. On 9 August the Serbian president said Serbia could divert the Ibër (Ibar), the river that fills the Ujman (Gazivode) reservoir supplying northern Kosovo; on 10 August he said he had not meant it. On 24 August his defence minister met China’s Guo Hongtao for the second session of a bilateral defence subcommittee and thanked Beijing for its arms in a readout that placed Kosovo inside the expression of gratitude. In the same days the president announced that an incendiary device had been thrown across the border from Kosovo; Kosovo Police stated that nothing had crossed, and the investigation results the president promised for the following morning have not been published. On 27 August, the day Ratko Mladić died in The Hague, Serbia’s justice minister told a Banja Luka television station that a general is a general, that “the protocols are known,” and that Mladić would be buried with the highest state honours. On 1 September, while Berlin was naming Russia, the Serbian president was hosting the Non-Aligned Movement in the Palace of Serbia, and the tabloid Informer was carrying a Russian commentator’s explanation that Leipzig was a German intelligence provocation.

Against that month, the Union’s record. Serbia’s alignment with the common foreign policy “remains low,” the Commission wrote in its November report, a formulation it has used for several years without attaching a consequence. Serbia’s allocation under the Reform and Growth Facility is €1.58 billion. The Facility’s only 2026 freeze came in the spring, over judicial laws that would have undermined the Commission’s own monitoring instruments, and Cluster 3 was recommended for opening in July while that freeze remained in place. The Facility contains no conditionality line for war-crimes accountability, for archives, for conduct toward neighbours, or for state honours to a genocide convict.

Milorad Dodik, for two decades the dominant Serb politician in Bosnia, produces the same result at smaller scale. His year was public: a letter of support from Dmitry Medvedev shared in February, Volodymyr Zelensky described in March as “an actor performing a comedy while his nation endures a tragedy,” attendance at Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day reception in May, a telephone call with Sergei Shoigu. The Union agreed no sanction against him, because Hungary blocked one and the Union had no procedure for overriding Hungary. His removal from office in 2025 was ordered by a Bosnian court under Bosnian law. The United States had sanctioned him years earlier.

Read together, these records point to a variable that is not force. The Union could respond to Leipzig with instruments whose political cost at home was low, a consulate and a threat level, with a sanctions list to follow. A serious response to Serbia, by contrast, would require the Commission and the larger member states to confront the possibility that a twenty-year policy of purchasing regional stability from its strongest actor had been financing that actor’s conduct, and the cost of that admission would fall in Brussels and Berlin, not in Belgrade. Mujanović has identified a reflex. The reflex is an aversion to cost, and it operates on the Union’s own side of the ledger before it operates on anyone else’s.

The same variable has a third case.

An applicant that imposes no cost on the Union is not answered either, for the same reason in reverse. Albania has aligned with every sanction on Russia and every Council declaration since 2014. It kept soldiers in Afghanistan for the length of that war and housed Afghan evacuees in 2021. It answered Leipzig within hours, in English, before most member states had. None of this has ever obliged Brussels to pay anything, and none of it has ever been priced. No one is punishing Albania for reliability. Reliability, once the other side has stopped expecting anything else, becomes a baseline assumption, and no institution pays for its assumptions. What Albania received in the same period was procedure: nine conditions from the Bundestag in September 2019, fifteen from the Council in March 2020, a first intergovernmental conference in July 2022, and in June of this year a paper from Merz and Macron in Tivat proposing a reformed accession method. The paper is carefully drafted. It is also what an institution that avoids cost offers an applicant it can afford to keep waiting: an improved procedure, in place of a decision.

It should be said what this does not show. It does not show hostility to Albania, and Germany in particular has defended Tirana’s file in the Council when France, Denmark and the Netherlands blocked it in 2019. What it shows is narrower. The Union’s attention follows the cost an actor can impose on it. Serbia has spent a decade learning how to raise that cost, one threat and one readout at a time, until the cost of confronting it has itself become part of Europe’s calculation. Montenegro supplies the current example. As Podgorica approaches the end of its accession negotiations, Euronews reports, citing officials, that Serbia may try to spoil the process to protect its influence, and Montenegro’s prime minister has warned of hybrid action from two neighbouring states around the next chapter closures, naming neither; Podgorica’s press supplied Serbia and Albania, and Tirana denied it. Serbia does not need a veto in the Council to acquire leverage. It needs European governments to believe that leaving Serbian interests out of the calculation will carry a price. Albania has spent the same decade lowering its cost to zero, and an actor that costs nothing is not on the list.

The consulate in Bonn closes on 18 September. Between now and then Belgrade will issue or sign something, and Tirana will align with something. Only one of those will be priced. The finding concerns the Union’s accounting, not its capacity.

Ardit Rada is Tirana-based journalist covering politics, governance, and institutional developments. Focused on the intersection of domestic political dynamics and Albania’s European trajectory.