Balkan News

ZAGREB (Reuters) – President George W. Bush assured Macedonia on Saturday that the United States wants it in NATO as soon as possible, along with other former Yugoslav republics.

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – The U.N. war crimes tribunal acquitted Kosovo’s former Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj on Thursday of charges of torturing and murdering Serbs during the 1998-99 war.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to focus on areas of agreement rather than discord at talks with NATO leaders on Friday, in efforts to keep ties with the West on a relatively even keel before he steps down.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – A delay in inviting Macedonia to join NATO could encourage radicals and fuel instability in the Balkans, Albania’s prime minister said, urging compromise to allow a last-minute deal at an alliance summit on Wednesday.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – President George W. Bush urged NATO allies on Wednesday to send more troops to Afghanistan, but France distanced itself from expectations in the alliance that it could deploy 1,000 extra soldiers.

PRISTINA (Reuters) – Serbia said on Monday it would conduct its May elections in the former Kosovo province as well, in a fresh challenge to the newly independent state and its international overseers.

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia will send humanitarian aid to Kosovo’s Serb-populated enclaves in early April, a Russian diplomat said on Monday, saying Moscow had not coordinated the move with the region’s ethnic Albanian leadership.

NIKOLSKOE, Russia (Reuters) – A Russian doomsday cult sheltering in a bunker say credit cards and food packaging bar codes are satanic, the official negotiating the release of children from the group said on Monday.

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – Once a laggard among former Soviet allies in joining the European Union and NATO, Romania hopes the military alliance’s summit in Bucharest this week will earn the Black Sea state a bigger role in southeastern Europe.

BELGRADE (Reuters) – Serbia has proposed a plan for the “functional division of Serbs and Kosovo Albanians” in Kosovo, Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samardzic was quoted on Saturday as saying.