During his meeting on Tuesday with President of the RNM Stevo Pendarovski in Brussels, HR/VP Josep Borrell reiterated North Macedonia’s clear and uncontested EU perspective and looked forward to the adoption of the negotiating framework by the Council so that the first intergovernmental conference can be held as soon as possible.

The European Union and the United States on Monday rejected the idea of redrawing borders in Western Balkans, after an unofficial diplomatic note proposing to break up Bosnia and merge Kosovo with Albania was circulated among EU officials, Reuters reported.

Thousands of opposition supporters protested on Sunday in North Macedonia’s capital of Skopje demanding retrials and freedom for more than a dozen former conservative government officials convicted for their roles in a mob invasion of parliament in 2017, AP reported.

An exit poll for Albania’s parliamentary election on Sunday suggests that the ruling Socialist Party is in a tight race with the opposition Democratic Party, AP reported. The exit poll run for Euronews Albania from the MRB, part of the London-based Kantar Group, projects that the left-wing Socialists will win about 46% of the vote while the Democrats are expected to capture about 42%.

Albanian voters head to the polls to elect the country's 140-seat parliament, with twelve political parties taking part in the race.

Albania is facing a parliamentary election on Sunday seen as vital for its ambitions to join the EU after an acrimonious campaign marred by a deadly gunfight between supporters of rival parties, AFP reported.

An Albanian man with a knife attacked and wounded five people on Monday at a mosque in the capital Tirana, police said, as investigators tried to determine a motive for the attack, AP reported.

Greece’s foreign minister travels to Ankara on Thursday for talks on the two NATO allies’ fraught relationship, following a slight easing of tensions between the neighbors.

Several thousand people in Serbia rallied on Saturday demanding that the government protect the environment in a Balkan nation that has seen record levels of air pollution and scores of other ecological problems following decades of neglect, AP reported.

Albania's government sent troops and police on Wednesday evening to clear striking air traffic controllers out of the flight control tower at the country's one international airport in the capital Tirana, AP reported. It was unclear how flights might resume as the civilian air traffic controllers were not replaced by members of the military.