During the opening reception of Serbia’s brand new embassy in Washington, D.C., Gabriel Escobar of the State Department boasted to the crowd, which included Serbian first lady Tamara Vucic and Ambassador Marko Duric, that relations between the Balkan nation and the United States have “never been better.” The comment from Escobar, the deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, comes amid the Biden administration‘s public support for the European Union‘s facilitation of relations between Kosovo and Serbia.
The building housing Serbia’s new embassy, its first permanent quarters in the capital for decades, once belonged to former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elihu Root. Tuesday evening’s reception featured a modern art exhibition of Serbian artists brought to the public in conjunction with the district’s own Anacostia Arts Center. Ambar, Washington’s flagship Balkan eatery with a location in Belgrade, catered the festivities, complete with servings of rakija, Serbia’s national drink.
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Serbia began the year at a crossroads, not just due to its own complicated relationship with Joe Biden, once the Senate’s champion of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign on Belgrade, but also because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Russia has historically cultivated Serbia as an ally, and like much of the Balkans, Serbia is almost entirely dependent on Russian oil and oil pipelines. However, despite Serbia’s professed “neutrality” in military alignment, the republic has repeatedly voted against Russia in the United Nations Security Council, most recently rejecting Russia’s initiative to hold a secret ballot on whether to condemn its attempted annexation of the Ukrainian territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.
Escobar met on Monday with Serbian parliament Speaker Vladimir Orlic, who was also in attendance at Tuesday’s reception. Secretary of State Antony Blinken talked on the phone with both Aleksandar Vucic, who won reelection earlier this year by more than 40 points, and Prime Minister Albin Kurti of Kosovo. State Department spokesman Ned Price said Blinken reaffirmed “the importance of the EU-facilitated Kosovo-Serbia Dialogue” to both Serbia and Kosovo and that the nation’s chief diplomat specifically thanked Serbia for its ongoing “support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity.”
