Yugoslavia

The families of the persons missing from the former Yugoslavia wars "welcome this day with the feeling of inexpressible pain," says Marko Djuric.

Greece's foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, is slated to pay a one-day visit to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the ministry said in an announcement on Wednesday.

The visit to the capital, Skopje, will take place on Thursday and will include talks on bilateral relations with Kotzias's counterpart, Nikola Dimitrov, which will be followed by joint statement to the press.

Social media users from Croatia and Serbia have ridiculed Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic for suggesting to a young footfall fan from Croatia that he should root for the Belgrade football clubs Crvena Zvezda and Partizan rather than for a home team.

More than a quarter of a century after the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia on Aug. 21 announced it had settled the last foreign debt it had inherited from the Soviet era.

In a statement, the finance ministry said the government had paid Bosnia $125.2 million (106.01 million euros), which was due under trade deals between the Soviet Union and another now-defunct state, Yugoslavia.

The high court in the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica, has accepted the request of the special prosecutor and blocked the property of the family of former Yugoslav President Svetozar Marovic until an investigation into the origin of the property of the former senior politician, who has been convicted of fraud, has finished.

Richard Holbrooke

Ivica Dacic seems to be in charge of making waves these days - after the Kosovo "delimitation" proposal, he has spoken about "Holbrooke's Kosovo letter."

The U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria has gathered enough evidence for President Bashar al-Assad to be convicted of war crimes, a prominent member of the commission, Carla del Ponte, said in remarks published on Aug. 13. Del Ponte, 70, who prosecuted war crimes in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, announced last week that she was stepping down from her role in frustration at the U.N.

The Trepca mining complex is split physically along ethnic lines, but Serb workers in the northern part of the former Yugoslav complex and the Kosovo Albanians in the southern part both have concerns about whether it can keep operating.

The fall of Yugoslavia and post-war ethnic divisions helped bring Trepca to the verge of bankruptcy.

The Russian finance ministry has told its counterpart in Bosnia that Moscow will transfer $125 million to Sarajevo to cover so-called 'clearing debt' of the former Soviet Union, the Bosnian finance ministry said on Tuesday.

The clearing debt was debt that the Soviet Union accumulated to the former Yugoslavia from the trade of goods.

A member of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Syria said on Aug. 6 she was quitting because a lack of political backing from the U.N. Security Council had made the job impossible, Swiss national news agency SDA reported.