"Serbia won't take sides in Ukraine conflict"

"Serbia won't take sides in Ukraine conflict"

"People are getting impatient because August is close and they are still not sleeping in their homes. The government is facing a crisis, but they will have to borrow to finance post-flood recovery," he told Bloomberg in an interview.

Nikolić said that he and Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency Chairman Bakir Izetbegović "will meet international donors at a conference in Brussels next week to drum up loans for the flood-affected areas."

“It appears we can expect hundreds of millions of euros from that conference, although the grants we receive won’t cover the entire damage,” Nikolić said.

Speaking about a new arrangement with the IMF, he said the government "should work to resume loan talks as a stamp of approval for its policies."

Bloomberg's article noted that the IMF said it will visit Serbia after the government has revised the budget to ensure spending on floods recovery, in two or three months and that the cabinet postponed talks with the IMF to assess damages from the floods.

“Serbia is not in a situation, like some other countries, to proceed without the IMF,” Nikolić said.

When it comes to the Ukraine crisis, the president said Serbia would continue to strive to remain uninvolved.

“It would be very unpleasant if we were forced to take sides. That would even divide Serbia. Many people in Serbia are Russophiles, while others accept western civilization as a better foundation for their life," he was quoted as saying.

Serbia "will seek to become a bridge for investment between east and west," Nikolić further stated, while the agency noted that the country "needs trade and investment after devastating floods in May caused USD 2 billion in damage."

Serbia started EU membership talks six months ago and plans to be able to join the 28-nation bloc by 2019, the article further said, and added that "foreign direct investments dropped to 201 million euros in the four months through April, or 8.6 percent less than in the same period last year, according to the central bank," while "recovery from the floods will fuel the budget deficit to more than 8 percent of economic output, the highest in Europe."

A prolonged European-Russian dispute over Ukraine may prompt “many EU investors to urgently transfer their investments to Serbia because it seems that Europe will impose sanctions that could negatively affect small and medium-sized EU companies that do good business with Russia,” Nikolić said.

Nikolić said his "east-west orientation follows one pursued by former Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito," and added: “Nowadays, Tito’s foreign policy concept is the only right choice."

The conflict between the EU and Russia over Ukraine "won’t affect Serbia’s plans to build its arm of the South Stream pipeline," the report noted, and quoted Nikolić as saying that the South Stream project was meant to avoid insecure and unstable shipments through Ukraine.

“Serbia has friends both in the West and in the East and they must not tear us apart, pulling us one way or the other. I don’t expect Serbia to be in a position to make a choice between the two because Serbia would not be able to choose," said the Serbian president.