- Ukraine disses HBO for hiring pro-Putin Serb to star in The White Lotus POLITICO Europe
- Ukraine hits out at HBO for casting pro-Russia actor in new season of White Lotus The Guardian
- “The White Lotus” casting controversy: Ukraine opposes HBO’s new actor as a “genocide supporter” Salon
- ‘The White Lotus’ Torched By Ukraine For Casting Pro-Putin Actor Miloš Biković: “Dear HBO, Do You Really Support Genocide?” Deadline
- Ukraine Slams HBO For Casting Pro-Putin Miloš Biković In ‘White Lotus’ TMZ
Tag Archives: Serb
Kosovo asks NATO to airlift a Serb detainee as tensions rise
PRISTINA, Dec 22 (Reuters) – (This Dec. 22 story has been corrected to say that police officers were transported by NATO via ground routes, not by helicopter, in paragraph 7)
Kosovo has asked NATO troops to airlift a former Serb policeman who was detained two weeks ago but could not be transferred elsewhere because local Serbs demanding his release set up barricades to prevent him being moved.
Dejan Pantic was arrested on Dec. 10 on charges of assaulting serving police officers during a previous protest.
Tensions have been running high since then as thousands of Kosovo Serbs protest, demanding the country’s Albanian-majority government pulls its police force out of the north, where the Serb minority is concentrated.
Local Serbs, who number around 50,000 in northern Kosovo, reiterated at a protest on Thursday that they would not remove the roadblocks unless Pantic is released.
“He (Pantic) should be in a detention center and not in a police station and that’s why we have asked our international partners to transfer him in an adequate facility,” Interior Minister Xhelal Svecla told a news conference in Mitrovica, just a few kilometers away from the first barricade.
NATO’s mission in Kosovo, KFOR, is the only force that has helicopters. Kosovo has no helicopters and would need NATO’s permission to hire one.
KFOR has already transported via ground routes nine police officers in recent days who were ill but unable to get out of the area after the roads were blocked.
The NATO force, which has more than 3,000 troops on the ground, said the KFOR commander is the sole authority to decide over Kosovo’s airspace.
“Every request that has been refused was because, as in the current situation, there were not the needed security conditions,” KFOR said in a written statement to Reuters without saying what request has been refused.
Svecla said his police force could remove the barricades but that he wanted local Serbs or NATO troops to remove them.
“For the sake of stability we are waiting for them to be removed by those who set them up or KFOR, but even waiting has its end,” he said.
Kosovo’s government has previously said people at the barricades are armed and any police intervention could harm people from both sides.
Ethnic Serb mayors in northern municipalities, along with local judges and some 600 police officers, resigned last month in protest over a Kosovo government decision to replace Serbian-issued car license plates with ones issued by Pristina.
Reporting by Fatos Bytyci, editing by Deepa Babington and Grant McCool
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Serbia to ask NATO to deploy Serb military, police in Kosovo
BELGRADE, Dec 10 (Reuters) – Serbia will ask NATO peacekeepers to let it deploy Serbian military and police in Kosovo, although it believes there is no chance of the request being approved, President Aleksandar Vucic said on Saturday.
Vucic told a news conference in Belgrade that he would make the request in a letter to the commander of the NATO force KFOR.
Vucic’s remarks came after a spate of incidents between Kosovo authorities and local Serbs who constitute a majority in northern areas of Albanian-majority Kosovo.
“We will request from the KFOR commander to ensure the deployment of army and police personnel of the Republic of Serbia to the territory of Kosovo and Metohija,” Vucic told a news conference in Belgrade. He said he had “no illusions” that the request would be accepted.
The government in Belgrade would formally adopt the document on Monday or Tuesday, he said.
It would be the first time Belgrade requested to deploy troops in Kosovo, under provisions of a U.N. Security Council resolution which ended a 1998-1999 war, in which NATO interceded against Serbia to protect Albanian-majority Kosovo.
The resolution says Serbia can deploy up to 1,000 military, police and customs officials to Orthodox Christian religious sites, areas with Serb majorities and border crossings, if such a deployment is approved by KFOR’s commander.
At the time it was agreed, Kosovo was internationally recognised as part of Serbia. With the West’s backing, Kosovo declared independence in 2008, a declaration not recognised by Serbia.
Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic
Editing by Peter Graff
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
In the Tinderbox of Bosnia, a Serb Nationalist Lights a Match
It was in Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, that a teenage Serb nationalist set off World War I by assassinating an Austrian archduke in June 1914, and where the seemingly deranged rants of a Serb psychiatrist, Radovan Karadzic, presaged a three-year spree of bloodletting in the 1990s. Those Balkan wars left roughly 140,000 people dead, drew in NATO warplanes and soldiers and created a rift between Russia and the West that remains today.
Now the United States and the European Union, which Bosnia aspires to join, are desperate to stop the new crisis from escalating into conflict, or creating the sort of political instability that Russia could exploit. Russia, which wants to prevent Bosnia from joining the bloc or NATO, is already siding with Mr. Dodik.
The frictions in Bosnia are rooted in the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, brokered by the United States. The deal stopped the fighting but created an elaborate and highly dysfunctional political system, with a weak central authority in which different ethnic groups share power. The trio of elected presidents are Mr. Dodik, who represents Serbs, Mr. Dzaferovic, who represents Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, and Zeljko Komsic, an ethnic Croat.
Mr. Dodik has made noises about Serb secession for more than a decade but has never before prompted such a volatile crisis. A report in October by the United Nations’ senior official in Bosnia, Christian Schmidt of Germany, described the situation as “the greatest existential threat” to the country’s survival since the early 1990s.
Mr. Schmidt, in a recent interview, played down the risk of a return to bloodletting and said he expected Mr. Dodik to back off his threat to form a separate ethnic Serb army.
Among many Bosnians, however, fear is again on the march.
When Mr. Schmidt met in mid-December with students at a vocational school in Tuzla, a town where Bosnia’s different ethnic groups have tended to live in rare harmony, he was repeatedly asked what he was doing to prevent a return to war.