Balkaninsight.com

Weakening EU and US influence in the Balkans and increased Russian influence, as well as growing political and economic pressures on journalists, have created a harsher environment for Balkan media, BIRN’s biennial meeting heard.

The home of Dragana Peco, award winning Serbia’s investigative reporter, has been broken into, with her belongings turned over, but no valuables reported missing.

Our selection of articles this week looks at Turkey’s growing drift away from the West, the rough seas in which Romania has suddenly found itself, how Bosnia’s left can be saved from drowning and much more. 

Without a thorough overhaul the Serb Democratic Party, SDS, faces further internal divisions and an uncertain political future, experts say.

Serbia’s robust tech sector is being assisted by schemes to encourage entrepreneurial endeavours - but some students still have to learn to take chances and join IT start-ups rather than seeking traditional jobs.

Twelve Bosnian Serbs convicted of genocide have served their sentences and been released - some have returned to live in places where the massacres happened, while others continue to deny that Srebrenica was genocide.

Croatia should remember its own bitter war of the 90s and open its borders to refugees, says Tvrtko Barun, a Jesuit priest who was recently honoured by the European Parliament.

Bosnia's Constitutional Court intervention over election laws could push the country into chaos and anarchy.

Judges said that legal changes proposed by Bulgaria’s ruling parties, which would limit access to foreign funding for judges’ unions, represent an attack on their independence.

After Russia agreed to pipe gas to Hungary, Bulgaria and Serbia via the Turkish Stream pipeline, US President Donald Trump in Warsaw urged Eastern Europeans to use US natural gas instead.

Research of Croatian daily media coverage showed that the issues of the country’s Serb minority are under-represented, and that they are not given the opportunity to voice their problems.

Wounded by executioners’ gunfire and left for dead by Bosnian Serb troops, Nedzad Avdic recalls how he managed to survive a mass shooting of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in July 1995.

The retrial of three men originally convicted of involvement in organ-trafficking from the Medicus clinic near the Kosovo capital began at Pristina Basic Court.

Brussels denied Belgrade media claims that the EU and US will fund a humanitarian centre in western Serbia as a response to a Russian-backed humanitarian centre in the country’s south.

A rally supporting the Bosnian Serb military commander and urging an end to ‘lies’ about the Srebrenica genocide, will be held in Banja Luka on the 22nd anniversary of the massacres.

A Serbian court has released two former State Security officers charged with participating in the 1999 murder of opposition journalist Slavko Curuvija from custody and put them under house arrest.

Izudin Alic was eight when Bosnian Serb Army chief Ratko Mladic met him and other Bosniak children in Srebrenica in 1995, gave them chocolates, and falsely promised that everyone would be safe.

Experts have dismissed reports that the series of small earthquakes that have shaken the lakeside town of Ohrid are awakening a long extinct volcano.

The National Anti-Corruption Directorate, DNA, is caught between internal bickering and external attempts to discredit its work - which experts fear could undermine the fight against corruption in general. 

US President Donald Trump is attending a meeting of the 'Three Seas Initiative', led by Poland and Croatia, which is seen as designed to 'keep Russia at bay'.