Turkey

Land troops of 12 countries will take part in the international military exercise at the Novo Selo range in Bulgaria. 

Saber Guardian, the largest exercise for this year, starts on Friday and will include 700 troops from Bulgaria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, USA, Belgium, Turkey and Ukraine, according to Bulgaria's Defence Ministry.

At least 9 people have been killed and several more injured when a passenger train collided with a minibus at a crossing near the Mediterranean port city of Mersin.

The accident happened on Thursday morning, when a shuttle bus was passing through a railway crossing near an industrial zone between the cities of Mersin and Tarsus, the Hurriyet Daily reports.

Southeast Europe, Turkey criticise Russian moves in Ukraine

The annexation of Crimea has many worried about Russian ambition in Eastern Europe.

A woman walks past Russian soldiers patrolling outside the navy headquarters in Simferopol on Tuesday (March 18th). [AFP]

SARAJEVO – Bosnia-Herzegovina's (BiH) Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija has said that the big victory of Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in the March 16 early parliamentary elections in Serbia is a great encouragement for the region.

A gunman killed 6 people and committed suicide after storming a statistics office in Turkey's city of Kars.

Turkish newspaper Hurriyet Daily News reports that several others were injured.

Two children, a girl and a boy, and three women were among seven migrants who drowned off the coast of the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos in the early hours of Tuesday when the plastic boat that was carrying them from Turkey to Greece took on water, the state-run Athens-Macedonia News Agency has confirmed.

Turkey will close the Bosphorus for Russian ships, if there is violence against the Crimean Tatars, said Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan. 

Miscalculations involving the fence which is to be constructed along the Bulgarian-Turkish border are worth around BGN 4 M.

Bulgaria's Defense Ministry has written up the total sum, thus increasing it from BGN 5.1 M to BGN 9.664 M.

Authorities in Greece said Tuesday they had recovered the bodies of seven immigrants who drowned overnight when a boat sank in the eastern Aegean Sea after traveling illegally from nearby Turkey.

Dimitar Bechev is a senior policy fellow and head of the office of the European Council on Foreign Relations in Sofia. From 2006-2010, he was a research fellow at Oxford's European Studies Centre and held a lectureship in International Relations at Worcester College, Oxford, and a visiting professorship at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo.