Vid Djuricic Stripped of Kosovo Citizenship

Kosovo’s Interior Ministry has stripped Vid Djuricic, an officer of Serbia’s Interior Ministry (MUP) detained on Thursday evening at the Jarinje administrative crossing, of his Kosovo citizenship. Djuricic was born on February 11, 1973, in Kosovska Mitrovica and, until this decision, held dual citizenship, Kosovo and Serbian. The Pristina ministry’s decision is dated August 6, 2026.

The document was published by RTK, which cited access to the act issued by the Interior Ministry in Pristina, while the detention itself was first reported by the portal KoSSev. Djuricic was released immediately after questioning. Two other MUP officers were with him at Jarinje, and neither of them was detained. As of publication, Serbia’s Interior Ministry had not commented on the case involving its officer.

What the decision’s reasoning says

The explanation accompanying the citizenship revocation states that Djuricic

is a member of the police force of another state

and that he had not obtained approval from the competent authority for this. The Pristina ministry links this conduct to activities that, according to the act, endanger Kosovo’s national security. The wording is administrative, without naming a specific proceeding or act that would be the subject of any investigation.

Kosovo police, for their part, confirmed that the person detained at Jarinje was questioned, but did not describe it as an arrest. The same police force has previously stressed that questioning does not necessarily mean police custody has been ordered. No formal charge was announced either on Thursday or afterward.

Why the date of the decision matters

The decision was issued on August 6, and that Thursday fell on August 6. The paper from Pristina, in other words, carries the date of the very evening Djuricic was stopped at the crossing. That timing stops the detention from looking like routine border control that happened to catch an officer from Serbia, since his name had already been processed in the administration.

This is also the first time a name has emerged from the string of detentions in northern Kosovo. In our report from August 7, when we wrote that one of three detained MUP officers had been held, Kosovo police did not disclose the identity or the legal grounds. Now it is known who was detained and on what basis the administrative proceeding against him was conducted. Why he was stopped at the crossing in the first place still is not.

How the case fits the pattern in the north

Jarinje has repeated over the past ten days or so as the point where people are stopped and taken in for questioning. The sequence:

• On August 2, a man from North Mitrovica was detained at the crossing, with the same caveat that questioning does not mean arrest
• On August 6, a search was carried out in the village of Dren near Zubin Potok, with one person brought in on suspicion of illegal weapons possession
• That same evening, three MUP officers were stopped at Jarinje, Djuricic among them

What is new this time is that the process did not end with release. Alongside the questioning, which concluded the same day, there is also an administrative act with more lasting effect, one issued outside the police case file and not disclosed to the public until the document leaked to Pristina media.

Pristina has not said when the decision was delivered to Djuricic, nor whether he knew about it before arriving at the crossing. Nor has it disclosed how many similar rulings have been issued against other dual citizens working in Serbian institutions in Kosovo, even though the reasoning uses a category rather than an individual description: membership in the police force of another state.

Whether the decision will be challenged, and before which authority, depends on Serbia’s Interior Ministry, which continues to say nothing about its officer, and on Djuricic himself. Until then, what remains is one recorded date, August 6, and one name that has moved out of a string of anonymous initials from the north and into an official document.