Written by Adri Nurellari
In the Balkans, Russian salad is the indispensable holiday dish; it appears on the table for New Year’s and for any “big” occasion, always cold and always the same taste. This Russian salad, or stolichni salad, was invented two centuries ago by the French chef Lucien Olivier in the most famous restaurant in St. Petersburg. Boiled potatoes, peas, carrots, cucumbers, mayonnaise; everything finely chopped and patiently mixed, until the ingredients lose their contours and become a single mass. No one can distinguish what was potato or carrot anymore; everything melts into an amorphous collective taste. The Special Court was created exactly like this; with many ingredients, many hands, a Russian recipe cooked in Strasbourg, France and served and devoured in our corner of the Balkans.
The “Russian salad” began to cook in the embryonic stage of Kosovo’s statehood. On April 15, 2008, the Russian deputy of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Konstantin Kosachev, submitted a proposal for a resolution on “inhuman treatment of persons and illegal trade in human organs” based exclusively on the statements of the book that Carla Del Ponte had published a few days earlier. This first attempt failed, but it resurfaced again as an attempt to delegitimize and tarnish another achievement of Kosovo in the international arena, the decision of the International Court of Justice which confirmed that the declaration of independence was legal. At a moment of legal consolidation for the new state, the narrative of organ trafficking resurfaced to shift the debate from legality to morality; from international law to the criminal record. For this, a figure from a “neutral” country was chosen, Dick Marty, who had loyally served Russian interests in the Council of Europe even before. This is Dick Marty’s 2006 report to the Council of Europe called “Secret detentions and illegal transfers between member states” which dealt with secret prisons and secret CIA flights in Europe during the war on terrorism.
On December 12, 2010, Dick Marty submitted his infamous report on “inhumane treatment and organ trafficking” to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which on January 25, 2011, adopted it as Resolution 1782. Based on this resolution and under international pressure, the EU-led Special Investigative Task Force (SITF) was established to investigate the allegations in the Marty report. In 2014, the Task Force itself admitted that there was no evidence of organ trafficking, but no one stopped the process. The avalanche was already in motion. Instead, a new court was built from a dismissed indictment. In 2015, Kosovo amended its Constitution and in 2016, the Specialist Chambers were established. Today, a decade later, we see the brutal result of the Russian recipe, how what started as a biological whim was transformed into legal architecture, and this architecture is producing serious collective accusations against the liberation war of the Albanian people in Kosovo.
What makes this salad even more bitter and confirms the suspicions of origin from the East, is the fact that the Council of Europe, at the time of the resolution, was led by a person whom the Epstein files, the media and Russian intelligence defectors in the West consider to be a KGB collaborator since the 70s, nicknamed “Yuri”. This is Thorbjørn Jagland (former Secretary General of the Council of Europe from 2009 to 2019. and former Prime Minister of Norway) against whom suspicions have already begun to arise that he has served for decades as one of the most important assets of Russian influence in Europe. These suspicions existed even earlier, especially during Jagland’s campaign to rehabilitate Russia within European institutions (by restoring its voting rights after the annexation of Crimea) as well as during the pressure he exerted on Azerbaijan, a country that plays a critical role in Europe’s energy security and diversification strategy.
The issue of “organ trafficking” was in itself a trump card hidden up the sleeve of Russian agencies, which had previously used this tool of extreme criminalization of opponents in the Caucasus. To justify the brutal reprisals of Russian government forces in Chechnya in the early 2000s, pro-government Russian media and some security officials accused Chechen separatist groups of kidnappings for ransom, human trafficking, and the sale of organs from victims of kidnapping or war. The same recipe cooked up in Moscow was also used during the armed unrest with the Muslim population of Dagestan and Ingushetia a short time later, as a tactic to dehumanize the other side in the eyes of domestic and international opinion.
This component of the Russian special operations menu (otherwise known as “active measures”) has been so successful that the allegation of organ trafficking was also used for the internal conflict in Syria after 2015, where Russian state media and Moscow officials have accused Syrian opposition groups of trafficking organs from civilians and refugees, in collaboration with criminal networks. The same weapon was also used for Ukraine after 2022, where Russia has accused Ukraine of trafficking organs from soldiers killed in “biological laboratories” with Western-backed networks. Of course, none of these accusations have been verified by independent international mechanisms.
The accusation of organ trafficking was chosen by the Russians because it is particularly effective, because it does not aim to convince, but to shock; it does not require proof, but produces disgust. It strikes directly at human instinct, shifting the conflict from politics to biology, from history to the body. It touches directly on one of the most sensitive nerves of the Western world, the defense of the body and of human life. As such, it has placed the European Union in the face of a difficult moral test; either it reacts strongly to an alleged monstrous crime, or it risks being accused of indifference to extreme human suffering.
The moment a party presents itself as capable of dismembering people and selling organs, that party is transformed into a moral monster. And monsters are not debated, they are automatically excluded because accusations of such extreme proportions create a strong emotional reaction and close any rational debate. This tactic creates a double preliminary legal effect, where the presumption of innocence is diluted by the moral gravity of the accusation itself and, at the same time, the accuser gains a certain moral superiority because he presents himself as a defender of bodily integrity and human life. In this way, the accusation produces moral guilt before there is a final court decision, gives the real aggressor a mask as an alleged “protector of life”, and reduces a complex political or historical conflict to a cruel criminal file where the context disappears and only the label of crime remains.
The way this process has developed, with serious procedural violations, with shifting standards of evidence, with unjustifiable delays, double standards, with a lack of impartiality and professionalism or with unprecedented tendentiousness of treatment, is a story in itself, deserving of a full file. Arrests without a verdict for years, prolonged detentions that in any normal system would be considered a preliminary sentence, accusations made in previous trials that are recycled with new formulations, and a pace of the process (that often seems more like an instrument of pressure than a search for the truth). But even in the face of this blatant accumulated procedural abuse, the Albanian institutional reaction has been almost non-existent. Instead of a legal, diplomatic, and communication counteroffensive, we have seen only romantic declarations of half-mourning, ceremonial solidarity and a passive expectation as if transitional justice were a natural process and not an arena of power. Even though so many years have passed since this recipe was "cooked", we still find ourselves unprepared, almost ready to give in. The government of Kosovo, but also that of Albania, has been reduced to pathetic phrases and photo-protocols, not to concrete state steps.
Therefore, it must be reiterated that in the cold halls of international justice in The Hague, an act is being played out that goes beyond the individual fates of the leaders of the former Kosovo Liberation Army. In the face of it, Kosovo and Albania remained stuck in a kind of romantic lethargy, believing that “law” is a self-executing force that unfolds on its own without needing support. In the rich literature of international relations, there is a tacit consensus that transitional justice is never simply a legal issue but much more complex. It is simultaneously a political, narrative and institutional issue. Courts judge individuals while states struggle for the meaning of history that will affect their future. Kosovo has unfortunately not yet understood that the process against the leaders of the KLA does not represent only a criminal procedure but is a Gordian knot where three key geopolitical fields collide: international law, state diplomacy and the production of collective memory.
In other words, the problem is not only the fact of how the Russian salad was served to us and how it is harming us day by day. The even more important problem is that we are swallowing it without chewing it and without building a counter-architecture, without creating institutions and without producing our own narrative as Albanians. To achieve these goals, Kosovo did not need to reinvent the wheel because models existed, from neighbors who had previously faced the challenge of international transitional justice. After the wars of the 90s, Croatia and Serbia quickly realized that international justice is not just a matter of courts but is a matter of state architecture that requires serious maximum commitment.
Croatia did not leave the narrative of the “Homeland War” to everyday politics or private lawyers, but institutionalized it as a state project. The axis of this architecture was the Ministry of Veterans, which functioned not only as a social mechanism, but also as an engine for the production of official history: it financed research on the war, supported publications in English, managed archives of evidence, and built an ecosystem of memorialization that turned Croatian interpretation into exportable knowledge. In parallel, the Croatian Memorial-Documentation Center for the Homeland War served as a bank of evidence and memory; it collected military documents, witness interviews, and databases open to Western scholars, building the archive before the narrative crystallized. This trunk was joined by an academic infrastructure, with the “Ivo Pilar” Institute of Social Sciences as a public think-tank that produced reports and projects in English on national identity, transition, and war. So did the Croatian Institute of History, where the equation “Homeland War = defensive war” was systematically codified through academic books, international conferences, and collaborations with elite Western universities. The Croatian diaspora also committed to getting involved and playing a key role in this battle for moral superiority, to win the minds and hearts of the democratic world. In other words, Croatia built the state capacity to explain itself to the West in the language the West trusts; with archives, academia, and diplomacy.
This strategy was most clearly seen in the case of generals Gotovina-Markač. After the conviction in the first instance, the reaction was not emotional, but operational. The Croatian state mobilized Western military experts, engaged famous foreign historians, activated embassies for intensive lobbying and used the diaspora as a network of influence; meanwhile, there was also a special government office for cooperation with the Hague Tribunal, which coordinated lawyers, supplied the court with materials and synchronized the state-media-diplomacy line. The result was the overthrow on appeal of the theory of the “joint criminal enterprise”, which was perceived as an organized state victory, not as a random procedural success. This is where the contrast with Kosovo and Albania arises: while Croatia built dedicated ministries, state archives, active historical institutes, public think tanks, books in English and stable legal diplomacy, we are left with only political statements. And if there is one lesson that emerges from this comparison, it is that in international justice it is not enough to have the right, but you must have institutions that make the right visible, documentable, and credible.
Likewise, Serbia did not react to international processes as if they were isolated peripheral episodes, but built a consistent state policy for managing the narrative of the wars of the 90s. Since the early 2000s, Belgrade invested in public and semi-public research institutes for documenting the conflicts, created centralized archives for Kosovo, and translated the materials into English for circulation in Brussels, The Hague, DC, and Western academic circles. Endless reports, books, “legal” studies, and historical analyses were produced that fed a single thesis; the moral equalization of the parties through the idea that “everyone committed crimes.” The aim was not to prove Serbia’s innocence, but to relativize historical responsibility, shifting the debate from state aggression to distributed collective guilt, from structural responsibility to individual incidents. In other words, as if “we were all guilty and at the same time we were all victims.”
In parallel, Serbia developed a permanent legal diplomacy. It maintained teams of lawyers and experts working exclusively on Hague Tribunal issues and the war narrative, ensured a constant presence at international legal conferences, and engaged professional lobbyists in Washington and European capitals. Serbian embassies, assisted by Russian ones, regularly supplied media and non-governmental organizations with materials, analyses, and files prepared in advance. This activity was not spontaneous; it was synchronized between state institutions, academia, and diplomacy, creating a closed loop of narrative production and distribution that constantly kept the Serbian version of history alive.
At the same time, Serbia built and promoted detailed dossiers specifically on Kosovo, which were circulated in European structures and international investigative mechanisms. The materials collected over the years were used as a reference base in the processes that led to the creation of the Specialist Chambers. This institutional intensity (archives, translations, lobbying, academic presence, diplomatic coordination) transformed the Serbian narrative into a permanent element of the international debate. In short, it was not an emotional reaction to developments but a well-thought-out long-term strategy to make the conflict “symmetrical” in the eyes of the West, to blur the aggressor-victim distinction and to turn history into a mosaic of distributed guilt, where political responsibility is lost in the fog of relativism. It is precisely the logic of the Russian salad, everything is mixed until the aggressor, the victim, the context and the chronology lose their shape; and in the end, only a vague collective taste of guilt remains.
At this point, Kosovo no longer has the luxury of emotional reaction or passive waiting. It must treat the Special Court as a strategic state front, not as an individual case of a few defendants. This means urgently establishing a permanent inter-institutional structure (with international lawyers, historians, diplomats and communication experts) that deals exclusively with The Hague and the war narrative. The construction of digitized archives of Serbian crimes, the financing of academic books in English, the organization of scientific conferences at Western universities and the contracting of serious think tanks to introduce the Kosovar perspective into the intellectual circulation of Europe and the US must begin immediately. In parallel, embassies must be transformed from protocol offices and electoral campaign offices for the ruling party into active centers of legal lobbying, while the diaspora must be mobilized as a political and academic network, not simply as an ATM, a reservoir of votes or symbolic solidarity.
It is equally important that Kosovo demands, with institutional language and legal arguments, the correction of procedural abuses: unjustified delays, long pre-trial detentions, unclear standards of proof and recycling of charges. At the same time, Kosovo should shift its political focus towards Brussels and demand, with legal and institutional arguments, a review of the way the Specialist Chambers function. After all, they were created as a result of an agreement between Kosovo and the European Union; therefore, the responsibility is shared. This court was a special ad hoc construction, without direct precedent in the classical institutions of international justice; a kind of legal experiment that has no consolidated alternative models to compare it with. Masked behind the location in The Hague where the ICTY or the ICJ have operated with dignity, this pilot creature has no connection to their standards. Precisely for this reason, Kosovo has the right and obligation to demand renegotiation of the problematic elements of the agreement, clearer procedural standards, and strong transparency and accountability mechanisms. The pressure for institutional clarification should not be seen as a challenge to justice, but as a defense of its principles and a face-saving measure for the EU that supports it.
This means returning the debate to the Kosovo Parliament, but also addressing the issue in the European Parliament, demanding stronger democratic oversight over a mechanism that operates “in the name of Kosovo” with EU funds and territory. Because a court that is convened in the name of a state like Kosovo with the blessing of the EU must necessarily have not only a constitutional basis, but also ongoing democratic legitimacy and parliamentary control. Transparency on procedures, costs, standards of proof and deadlines is essential to avoid the perception of a structure that functions as a private corporation disconnected from the will of citizens that cares only to justify and prolong its existence. If Kosovo does not demand this accountability now, it risks remaining not only the subject of a criminal process, but also a spectator of an “innovative” legal architecture that operates without sufficient democratic control over its name and sovereignty.
This is not done with patriotic declarations, but with technical dossiers submitted to the appropriate European forums (compiled by institutes and experts with global reputation), with coordinated diplomatic pressure and with full transparency towards international public opinion. Essentially, Kosovo must move from the phase of moral victimization to the phase of building state capacity; to produce knowledge, documents and alliances. Because as we have seen with other countries involved in conflicts in the past, in international justice the one who has only historical right wins not necessarily the one who wins but the one who turns that right into institutional architecture. After 2022, the Russian aggression against Ukraine has created a much more receptive and favorable strategic context in the West for the deconstruction of narratives cooked up and sponsored by Moscow's kitchen, a momentum that Kosovo can and must turn into a historical, diplomatic and legal counteroffensive.
But this battle cannot and should not remain Kosovo's burden alone. This necessarily includes Albania's role as a power multiplier, as a mother state with more consolidated diplomatic, academic and institutional capacities in the Western arena. Tirana must step out of its symbolic comfort zone and take real strategic responsibility by creating a joint Albanian center for documenting Serbian crimes, funding academic production in English, engaging Western universities and research institutes, and activating the diplomatic network for coordinated legal lobbying. Albania has embassies, bilateral relations, presence in international organizations and political access that Kosovo does not yet fully have, and these must be turned into political capital for the defense of the narrative of the Albanian liberation war.
If Kosovo is the party on trial, Albania must be the platform that multiplies its voice around the world, and this means putting aside ego clashes between leaders and taking concrete steps. Joint Tirana-Pristina task forces are needed, funds dedicated to international studies and publications, annual conferences on crimes in Kosovo, and professional lobbying contracting in Brussels and Washington. So far, Albania has been limited mainly to rhetorical solidarity and protocol photography. But history is not won with declarations but with institutions. Without this active involvement of Albania as a reinforcer of Kosovo's state power, this process that today seems legal will tomorrow crystallize as a narrative loss for the entire Albanian space. If this rise to its feet and intensive mobilization does not happen now, the criminal process will continue to transform into a narrative process, into collective national stigmatization, and then the cost will not only be legal, but deeply political for generations to come. In this geopolitical salad, there are not many choices; Either you write the recipe, or you end up torn apart inside it, so either you're at the decision table, or you're an offering on the menu.
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