Serbian Defense Minister Milosh Vucevic said on Monday that the number of members of the special units of the Serbian Armed Forces will increase from 1,500 to 5,000 by the end of 2023. Such a decision came, he said, "by order" of the president of Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic. 

In the statement published by the Ministry of Defense, Vucevic did not give concrete reasons for this decision, except that he said that the Serbian Armed Forces will be "the strongest fist that will crush the wishes and bad intentions" of those who "want harm our people". 

"I want to inform the opinion of Serbia and not only Serbia, that last night General [Milan] Mojsilovic, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Serbia, and I received a task, an order from the President of the Republic as Commander-in-Chief [ Aleksandar Vucic], to increase the number of members of special units in the Serbian Army until the end of 2023", said Vucevic. 

Vucevic said that the Serbian army will have 5,000 soldiers trained and equipped with the most modern weapons, ready "to defend the homeland, to perform any task at any time and in any part of our territory." 

They will be ready to respond to all the challenges our country faces, added Vucevic. 

This decision comes a day after the Chief of the General Staff of the Serbian Army, Milan Mojsilovic, said that on the evening of December 25, he had a meeting with the president of Serbia and the military leadership regarding the events in Kosovo. After that meeting he went to Raska, in the south of Serbia. 

Mojsilovic told Pink television that the situation in Kosovo is such that it requires the presence of the Serbian army along, as he said, the "administrative line". 

On Sunday evening, the NATO mission in Kosovo, KFOR, announced that it had "heard and seen gunshots" near one of its patrols in Zubin Potok - one of four municipalities in Kosovo's Serb-majority north. 

The media in Serbia reported on Sunday that around 19:45 gunshots were heard in Zubin Potok and that this happened after the Kosovo police "wanted to remove one of the barricades" erected by the Serbs on December 10. This information has been denied by the Kosovo Police. 

The tense situation in the north of Kosovo since November has escalated after the arrest of the former police officer with Serbian nationality, Dejan Pantic - who is suspected of the December 6 attack on the office of the Central Election Commission in the north. 

To oppose his arrest, groups of Serbian citizens in the north erected barricades as early as December 10. Because the barricades have blocked the roads leading to the border crossings, Jarinje and Bërnjak - which connect Kosovo and Serbia - these two points are closed to traffic. 

The authorities in Kosovo said that they have the capacity to remove the barricades erected in the north, but that they have given time to the NATO mission, KFOR, to convince the local community to remove them themselves.