Prishtina Basic Court on Monday sentenced a Kosovo Serb, Nenad Orlovic, to 15 months’ imprisonment and fined him 12,000 euros for participating in violent clashes between Serb protesters and the NATO peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, KFOR, on May 29 last year in the Serb-majority northern municipality of Zvecan.

He was convicted of assaulting an official and being part of a crowd that committed “criminal offences and hooliganism”.

“The time spent in detention since June 23, 2023, will be calculated towards the prison sentence,” the court said. The verdict can be appealed.

Protests by Serbs on May 29 last year against the installation of ethnic Albanian mayors in the Serb-majority northern Kosovo municipalities of Zubin Potok, Leposavic and Zvecan turned violent, and scores of KFOR personnel were injured.

Pristina Basic Court found that Orlovic, nicknamed Nemac (German) and Rus (Russian), in coordination with other Kosovo Serbs, attacked and threatened KFOR peacekeepers using “improvised explosive devices as well as firearms”.

At least 30 KFOR troops were injured, as well as several Kosovo Police officers who were on duty.

Kosovo Police have so far arrested at least five suspects, including Orlovic, for participating in the violence.

Milun ‘Lune’ Milenkovic was arrested in June 2023 on suspicion of orchestrating attacks against NATO peacekeepers

Rados Petrovic and Dusan Obrenovic were found guilty in February 2024 of participating in the violent protest against KFOR. Petrovic was sentenced to six months in prison, but with his consent the sentence was turned into a 6,000-euro fine.

Obrenovic was sentenced to six months in prison, but the time spent in detention was counted towards his sentence; he had been in detention for over five months.

On June 19 this year, another suspect, named only by the initials L.D., was arrested at the Bistrice border point.

The Association of Journalists of Kosovo registered 30 attacks against journalists during the protests in Zubin Potok, Leposavic, and Zvecan, which called on mayors elected on April 23, 2023 in extraordinary elections boycotted by ethnic Serbs not to use municipal buildings and for the Kosovo Police to withdraw from the area.

Kosovo Police made three arrests over attacks on journalists in Leposavic and Zvecan, all of them Kosovo Serb males. The arrests triggered a peaceful protest march in June 2023.