Late Sunday, demonstrators parked trucks full of gravel and other heavy machinery on the roads leading to the two border crossings, Jarinje and Bernjak, in territory where Serbs are the majority. Kosovo police said they had to close border crossings.
“The general security situation in the municipalities of northern Kosovo is tense,” KFOR, the NATO-led mission in Kosovo, said in a statement.
Moscow, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Minister, Maria Zakharova, attributed the renewed tension to what she called “unfounded discriminatory rules” imposed by the Kosovo authorities.
Fourteen years after Kosovo declared independence from Serbia, some 50,000 Serbs living in the north are using license plates and documents issued by the Serbian authorities, refusing to recognize institutions in the capital, Pristina. Kosovo has been recognized as an independent state by more than 100 countries, but not by Serbia or Russia.
Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s government has said it will give Serbs a 60-day transitional period to obtain Kosovo license plates, a year after giving up trying to impose them due to similar protests.
The government has also decided that from 1 August all citizens of Serbia visiting Kosovo will have to obtain an additional document at the border to grant them permission to enter.
A similar rule is applied by the Belgrade authorities to Kosovars traveling to Serbia.
But following tensions on Sunday evening and consultations with EU and US ambassadors, the government said it would delay its plan for a month, and start implementing it on September 1.
Earlier on Sunday, police said shots had been fired “in the direction of police units, but luckily no one was injured”.
She also said angry demonstrators beat several Albanians who were passing on roads that had been blocked and some cars were attacked.
Air raid sirens were heard for more than three hours in the small town of North Mitrovica inhabited mainly by Serbs.
A year ago, after local Serbs blocked the same roads because of license plates, the Kosovo government deployed special police forces and Belgrade flew fighter jets near the border.
Tensions between the two countries remain high and Kosovo’s fragile peace is maintained by a NATO mission with 3,770 soldiers on the ground. Italian peacekeepers were visible in and around Mitrovica on Sunday.
The two countries engaged in a European Union-sponsored dialogue in 2013 to try to resolve outstanding issues, but little progress has been made.