The leaders of Serbia and Kosovo met face-to-face for the first time in almost two years at EU-brokered talks in Brussels Thursday.

The talks were attended by President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and Kosovo Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti.

The meeting followed a videoconference earlier Sunday at which the two leaders spoke with the EU's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, and the EU's special representative for the process, Miroslov Lajcak.

Borrell said after Thursday's talks he expects the discussions to contribute to the "comprehensive normalization of relations between Kosovo and Serbia."

"I am glad to see that the European Union is back in the driver's seat of the process," he added, welcoming the resumption of talks and urging both sides to approach them "in the spirit of compromise and pragmatism."

Serbia refuses to recognize Kosovo, a former Serbian autonomous province that broke away in 1999 after NATO intervened to end Belgrade's repression of a rebellion by the ethnic Albanian majority.

An EU-mediated dialogue between Pristina and Belgrade that began in 2011, three years after Kosovo declared independence, had intended to normalize relations but has been put on ice since November 2018.