Turkey’s Drone Sales to Kosovo Test its Friendship with Serbia

For over a decade, Ankara and Belgrade have built a relationship of convenience marked by booming trade, growing defence ties and Belgrade’s willingness to accommodate Turkey’s crackdown on its political opposition abroad. But Kosovo remains Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s political red line, a card he knows how to play. Facing unprecedented domestic opposition, he may use the Kosovo question to rally support around the flag, but despite the fuss Vucic made about this week’s shipment of military drones to Pristina, the issue will not cause a lasting rift in relations with Ankara. Uneasiness in their political balancing act is not new. There was a significant backlash in bilateral relations in 2013 following Erdogan’s “Kosovo is Turkey, Turkey is Kosovo” remark in Prizren. His references to the Ottoman Empire alienated Serbs, but his personal diplomacy after 2014 helped overcome these tensions. In 2017, the two countries established the High-Level Cooperation Council, and in 2024, they announced a defence industry cooperation. What happened in the meantime? After 2014, mutual interest in Turkey’s economic engagement in Serbia helped mend ties. Turkey’s annual foreign direct investment in Serbia is modest, ranking around 15th overall in the 2010s, but its limited economic footprint translated into outsized political visibility. Targeted factory openings in underdeveloped regions boosted Vucic’s popularity. The Serbian president often attended opening ceremonies of relatively small plants to take credit, praising Turkey as the only country investing in smaller cities. Following Turkey’s failed coup attempt in 2016, the relationship took a distinctly political turn. Serbia was among the first countries to condemn the coup plotters and the only one in the Western Balkans to close institutions tied to the movement established by cleric Fethullah Gulen, which Erdogan blames for the coup. This solidarity did not remain unreturned. When Kosovo applied for Interpol membership in 2016, Turkey initially vocally supported the bid. After Serbian lobbying, it moderated its stance. While Ankara did not change its official policy, the rhetorical restraint was enough to win Belgrade’s goodwill. The deepening political cooperation soon extended into defence. In 2019, Serbia and Turkey signed a defence cooperation agreement. As Turkish drones proved effective in Syria, Libya, and Nagorno-Karabakh, Vucic expressed interest in buying Bayraktar TB2s from Ankara. But Serbia abandoned the plan after Kosovo acquired the same technology in 2023. Vucic anticipated that Turkey’s defence cooperation with Kosovo would strain bilateral relations, but avoided harsh criticism until now. This time, he reacted sharply over the drone delivery to Kosovo, accusing Turkey on October 8 of “dreaming of restoring the Ottoman Empire”. A day later, however, he retracted, describing Erdogan as a great leader and saying Serbia wants “the closest” relations with Turkey. The scenario was a result of his domestic circumstances: under pressure from street protests, Vucic was seeking to use regional tensions to deflect attention from domestic discontent — but ultimately, he didn’t want to alienate a useful partner in Ankara. Turkey was among the first to recognise Kosovo in 2008 and has since backed its efforts for wider international recognition. During the early 2010s, frequent visits between then prime minister Hashim Thaci and Erdogan deepened ties, while Turkish companies secured major stakes in Kosovo’s economy: from the airport and electricity distribution to a significant share of the banking sector. However, Kosovo proved less cooperative on politically sensitive issues because of its fragmented political landscape. Unlike Serbia’s centralised leadership, Turkey’s relations with Kosovo have fluctuated with the country’s shifting political alliances. Navigating Kosovo’s politics has always required engaging a variety of stakeholders. Thaci was Turkey’s primary interlocutor after the war, but his power in the 2010s was constrained compared to Vucic’s in Serbia. The growing influence of the Vetevendosje party in the opposition, Western actors and other Kosovo Liberation Army factions, notably Ramush Haradinaj’s Alliance for the Future of Kosovo party, diluted Thaci’s authority and exposed the limits of Ankara’s influence. The 2018 deportation of six Turkish citizens, allegedly members of the Gulen movement, became a turning point. The operation, coordinated by both countries’ intelligence services, revealed Ankara’s leverage but also provoked backlash when Haradinaj, then prime minister, dismissed security officials involved. Erdogan accused Haradinaj of protecting terrorists, while Thaci, who approved the operation as president, maintained cordial ties and even attended Erdogan’s 2019 inauguration. The incident marked both the peak and the beginning of the decline of Turkey’s personalised diplomacy in Kosovo. As Thaci resigned to face war crimes charges in The Hague and Vetevendosje won the 2021 elections, Turkey lost key personal allies in Pristina. Its engagement became less personalised but more institutional: cooperation continued through NATO and bilateral defence channels. Since the Russia-Ukraine war intensified in 2022, Turkey has sought to present itself as a regional stabiliser, much to Serbia’s disapproval. After violent clashes between NATO peacekeepers and Serb protesters in northern Kosovo in 2023, Ankara contributed additional troops to NATO’s Kosovo peacekeeping force, KFOR. The following year, Turkey and Kosovo signed a military cooperation agreement, which Belgrade deems illegal under UN Security Council Resolution 1244. Pristina purchased drones and military vehicles, and agreed to establish an ammunition factory with Turkey’s state-owned Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation. These moves signal a shift: as Ankara’s political foothold weakened, defence cooperation became the main channel of influence. That’s why, even though Vucic’s remarks about the drone sales to Kosovo may not have been well-received in Ankara, Turkey’s policymakers know that Serbia remains the region’s only relatively stable government they can count on for business and political cooperation. Vucic’s outburst is best understood as an attempt to distract voters from the protests threatening his rule. His quick retraction shows that despite moments of rhetorical tension, neither side wishes to jeopardise this transactional friendship. In the long run, the pragmatic partnership between Ankara and Belgrade will endure as a friendship built on convenience rather than trust. Laszlo Szerencses is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Turkish Studies at Stockholm University. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BIRN.