PRISTINA, Kosovo (AP) — Kosovo has received an important mark of recognition eight years after declaring independence from Serbia: its own telephone country code.

The government announced that the United Nations agency for information and communication technologies had assigned Kosovo the code +383 for landline calls to the country and that it became on active Thursday.

Landlines in Kosovo previously required the +381 code the International Telecommunication Union had granted to the former Yugoslavia and which was later used by Serbia.

Kosovo got the country code of its own as a result of an agreement with Serbia. European Union-brokered talks regulate relations between the two countries since Serbia does not recognize its former province.

For now, mobile phone networks in Kosovo still will use either Monaco's code — +377 — or Slovenia's +386.