Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic is attending the prestigious WORLD.MINDS conference in Belgrade. The conference gathers leading world innovators, scientists, business leaders and artists, who are presenting the ideas of the new era in an inspirational way.

Vucic and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are currently discussing geopolitical issues, the bombing Serbia and Kosovo and Metohija. Asked by Marc Walder, director of Ringier, what his memories of the bombing period were, Vucic said that it was certainly a bad decision and said that we must forgive, but that we cannot forget.

"It would be easy to criticize Schroeder and say that it was a bad decision. Many civilians were killed in NATO bombing, innocent people, we must forgive, we cannot forget, but we must continue. We need to create an economically prosperous country. We all want to see progress, and you Marc know that figures show that we are making excellent economic progress," the Serbian president said, Blic reports.

The question for the former German chancellor was that 20 years had passed since the NATO bombing, and what led them to take that action against Serbia, Schroeder said it was a very emotional decision.

"First the decision on Iraq was made, we had to decide whether to participate or not. The other difficult decision was that we had to accept the intervention in Afghanistan. Together with NATO partners we had to decide to attack Serbia. It was a very emotional decision, but we had to decide to participate in the bombing after considering the whole situation in Kosovo," Schroeder said.

Speaking about Kosovo issue now, Schroeder opined the easiest solution would be to first admit Serbia to the EU and then to consider possible solution for Kosovo. In order not to be negative, I think that Serbia is on a very good path, he added.

Meanwhile, President Vucic said that we are all lost in space and time when it comes to Kosovo. “I will be honest with you. We discussed for almost five hours and then I got the message – we need to speed up solution, to intensify the efforts to resolve the issue. Pristina cannot consolidate without Serbia, and we will do the best we can to preserve peace and stability,” Vucic said.