The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic, said that Serbia is ready to sign an agreement with Kosovo on missing persons in the war. Teams from Kosovo and Serbia met several times to discuss the issue of missing persons during the 1998-99 war in Kosovo. 

"We are ready to sign an agreement for the missing persons. We are aware that we have to live next to each other," Vucic said after laying wreaths at the Koshare Heroes Monument in Belgrade. 

This issue was also raised in the framework of the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia for the normalization of relations, which takes place in Brussels, with the mediation of the European Union. 

A senior EU diplomat said in late April that Kosovo and Serbia were "very close" to signing two agreements on missing persons, but officially, so far, no such agreement has been reached. Earlier, the prime minister of Kosovo, Albin Kurti, has requested that Velko Odallovic. be dismissed from the position of head of the Serbian Commission for Missing Persons, as he is a member of the Socialist Party of Serbia. The latter, in the 1990s, was led by then-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. 

During the war in Kosovo, about 13,000 people were killed, over 800,000 were displaced, and about 6,000 disappeared. More than 1,600 people are still missing to this day. 

Hundreds of bodies of slain Kosovo Albanians have been found in mass graves in Serbia. Recent searches at the Staval site in southern Serbia say no remains have been found. The searches there were conducted for 13 days in May. 

The Kosovo Government Commission on Missing Persons has said that, although it has repeatedly asked representatives of Serbian institutions to share information from their archives, including on Staval, "such a thing has not happened." 

However, Odalovic ka denied this. Vucic laid wreaths on the occasion of the 23rd anniversary of the end of the battle in Koshara - Municipality of Ferizaj - between members of the then Yugoslav Army and the Kosovo Liberation Army. The battle lasted several weeks in the spring of 1999, leaving dozens of fighters killed on both sides. 

Vucic also commented on the statement of the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, on Tuesday, who, during a visit to Kosovo on June 10, said that the dialogue between Kosovo and Serbia should also resolve the issue of recognizing Kosovo. "Our goal is to negotiate," Vucic said. 

"As far as the violation of statehood and territorial integrity is concerned, we respect the public international law, to which the whole world invokes. We only repeat what the West constantly says when it calls for respect for Ukraine's territorial integrity," Vucic said.