I. INTRODUCTION 3 High-precision spectroscopy of Li-like ions continues to be of interest both theoretically and experimentally. On the one hand such ions are among the simplest few-electron systems that can be theoretically described with high accuracy, on the other hand high precision measurements are also available. Investigations of such systems enable precision tests of quantum electrodynamics (QED) at strong fields, as well as studying various nuclear prop- erties probed by the atomic structure. During the last decades significant theoretical efforts were undertaken to evaluate various contributions to the energy levels in high- Z Li-like ions [1–16]. However, further improvements in theoretical calculations are required in order to meet the high level of the experimental accuracy [17–26]. This work is devoted to high precision calculations of the 2 p$_{j}$ − 2 s transition energies in middle- Z Li-like ions. As was noticed in Ref. [13], the leading sources of theoretical un- certainty originate from the relativistic recoil and higher-order screened QED corrections. Therefore, the present paper is mainly focused on evaluation of these corrections. The paper is organized as follows: Sec. II is devoted to the calculation of the relativistic nuclear recoil ef- fect employing the large-scale configuration-interaction Dirac-Fock-Sturm method (CI-DFS). The method used for the calculation of the higher-order (in 1 /Z ) relativistic recoil corrections allows us also to obtain accurate numerical values for the interelectronic-interaction contri- butions to the transition energies within the Breit approximation. In Sec. III these results are combined with the rigorous QED calculation of the one- and two-photon exchange contri- butions to obtain the higher-order electron-electron interaction corrections to the transition energies with the same accuracy level as in Ref. [13]. The calculation of the screened QED corrections is presented in Sec. IV. A local screening potential is included in the zeroth- order Hamiltonian. Then, the first and second-order diagrams representing the screened self-energy (SE) and vacuum-polarization (VP) corrections are rigorously evaluated. In the last section, we compile all the contributions to get the most accurate theoretical predictions for the 2 p$_{1}$$_{/}$$_{2}$ − 2 s and 2 p$_{3}$$_{/}$$_{2}$ − 2 s transition energies of Li-like ions in the range of the nuclear charge number Z = 10 − 60 and compare them with experimental data available. Relativistic units ( ℏ = 1, c = 1, m = 1) and the Heaviside charge unit [ α = e $^{2}$/ (4 π ), e < 0] are used throughout the paper.