Of the 6,065 people who went missing during the 1998-99 war, around 1,600 cases remain unresolved, according to the EU's diplomatic service.

Although the Declaration on Missing Persons was agreed in May 2023 by Kosovo Prime Minister Albin Kurti and Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, little progress has been made so far.

A focus of the commission will be to ensure cooperation in locating burial sites and sharing information to identify missing people.

The EU said in a statement that it had "great expectations" that the commission could help "close a painful chapter" for the families of the missing.

Chief negotiator for Serbia Petar Petkovic and his Kosovo counterpart Besnik Bislimi, along with EU Special Representative Peter Sorensen, held the first meeting late Thursday in Brussels.

Bislimi described the talks as "successful" while Petkovic said the issue was not "political, but humanitarian".

"We will do everything necessary to help establish the full truth as soon as possible and to clarify the fate of all missing persons," Petkovic said.

The war between Serbian forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the late 1990s left more than 13,000 people dead, and ended after NATO bombardment forced Belgrade's troops and police from the territory.

Relationships between the two countries have remained tense since, with Belgrade never recognising the smaller nation's independence, which it declared in 2008.

For more than a decade, the EU-facilitated dialogue on normalising relations has been held in Brussels, but it stalled in recent years.

Vucic and Kurti have not met since 2024, but resolving bilateral relations remains crucial for both countries' EU ambitions.

The meeting comes after Sorensen visited Belgrade and Pristina earlier this month to stress the need for tangible results this year.