Former war foes Serbia and Kosovo will restart talks in Brussels on Thursday to normalise their strained relationship after a long stalemate, though the road to settling their many disputes is paved with stumbling blocks.

The first case of coronavirus in Serbia has been diagnosed in a man who had been in Hungary, the country's health minster announced on Friday. 

Kosovo and Serbia must put aside extremist rhetoric and recommit to peace, the White House said Monday, 20 years after the end of a NATO bombing campaign against a Serbian crackdown.

Serbia and Kosovo have agreed at a summit in Berlin to resume talks, after the leaders of France and Germany warned the bitter foes that resolving their dispute was crucial to future ties with the European Union.

A deal between Serbia and Kosovo is possible this year but cannot include border changes, Kosovo's premier Ramush Haradinaj told AFP in an interview, warning that territory swaps could revive old demons in the war-scarred Balkans.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday called for stability in the Balkans during a visit to Serbia, a key Moscow ally in the volatile region.

Serbia's electoral commission has asked some voters to recast their ballots after both opposition groups and powerful Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic, who won by a landslide, disputed the regularity of the weekend polls.

The repeat votes at 15 polling stations, likely to take place next week, mean the final results of Sunday's general election will not be announced on Thursday, as required by law.

Serbia's pro-EU Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic won a landslide victory in general elections, the electoral commission confirmed Monday after nearly all ballots were counted.

Vucic's Serbian Progressive Party won 48.25 percent of the vote, giving him 131 MPs in the 250-seat parliament -- down from 158 in the last election, the commission said based on 98 percent of votes counted.

U.N. war crimes judges have ordered an indefinite halt to the trial of Croatian Serb rebel leader Goran Hadzic who is suffering from brain cancer, according to a ruling released Tuesday.

In a majority decision, the judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found that Hadzic "is currently unfit to stand trial".

An explosive device was thrown and automatic weapons were fired at a sports hall in northern Kosovo on Sunday some 12 hours before Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic was due to visit, Serbian media reported, adding that there were no casualties.

The blast occurred outside a hall at Zubin Potok at around 3:00 a.m. (0100 GMT) as workers were setting up a stage where Vucic was to make a speech, the state-run news agency Tanjug reported.