Serbia votes in historic election as students seek to end Vucic’s long grip on power

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By Mina PEJAKOVIC AFP | Posted by TOE Voting was under way in Serbia on Sunday in what is set to be its most fiercely contested parliamentary election in more than 14 years, as a student-led movement seeks to oust the party of veteran leader Aleksandar Vucic. The snap vote is the culmination of nearly two years of student-led protests sparked by the 2024 collapse of a canopy at Novi Sad railway station that killed 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on corruption. The disaster triggered some of Serbia’s largest protests since the fall of strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. The Students’ List, a selection of candidates backed by the largely leaderless movement, now poses the biggest challenge to Vucic’s right-wing populist Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), which has dominated politics throughout its tenure. – High turnout – Eighteen electoral lists are vying for seats in Serbia’s 250-member parliament, but polls suggest ...
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US threatens to walk away from Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks if no progress made ‘in days’

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By Bart H. Meijer and Dominique Vidalon Reuters

U.S. President Donald Trump will walk away from trying to broker a Russia-Ukraine peace deal within days unless there are clear signs that a deal can be done, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Friday.

“We’re not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end. So we need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks,” Rubio said in Paris after meeting European and Ukrainian leaders.

“The president feels very strongly about that. He has dedicated a lot of time and energy to this … this is important, but there are a lot of other really important things going on that deserves just as much, if not more attention.”

Rubio’s warning came amid signs of some progress in U.S. talks with Ukraine.

Trump said on Thursday he expected to sign a deal with Kyiv next week that would give the U.S. access to Ukraine’s minerals. An attempt to sign a minerals pact in February fell apart after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s clash with Trump and Vice President JD Vance in the Oval Office.

After the talks in Paris on Thursday – the first substantive, high level and in-person talks on Trump’s peace push that have included European powers – Rubio said a U.S. peace framework received an “encouraging reception”. Zelenskiy’s office called the talks constructive and positive.

Rubio’s comments on Friday underline mounting frustrations in the White House over a lack of progress in pushes to settle a growing list of geopolitical challenges.

Trump promised during his election campaign to end the war in Ukraine within his first 24 hours in the White House. He moderated that claim on taking office, suggesting a deal by April or May as obstacles mounted.

Rubio said he spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after the Paris talks and had told him they had been constructive, and also briefed him on “some of the elements of” the U.S. peace framework.

Rubio said the issue of U.S. security guarantees as part of any deal came up in the talks in Paris, without going into greater detail.

He said security guarantees was an issue “we can fix in sort of in a way that’s acceptable to everyone,” but “we have bigger challenges that we need to figure out, whether it’s even possible within the short term”.

He said it was clear that a peace deal would be difficult to strike but there needed to be signs it could be done soon.

“There’s no one saying this can be done in 12 hours. But we want to see how far apart it is and whether those differences can even be narrowed, if it’s even possible to get movement within the period of time we have in mind,” he said.

Neither French presidency or foreign ministry immediately returned requests for comment.



from The Times Of Earth https://ift.tt/C7oWmg1

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