The EU brought Serbia a crucial step closer to joining its 27-member bloc yesterday, despite Belgrade’s failure to arrest the continent’s top war crimes suspect, Ratko Mladic.

Serbia’s pro-European government has long pledged to make the arrest of the wartime Bosnian Serb general a priority, but its security forces seem no closer to catching him.

But while EU foreign ministers eased the way towards Serbia joining the EU, they called on Belgrade to increase efforts to bring in Mr Mladic and another suspect, Croatian Serb wartime political leader Goran Hadzic.

Serbian President Boris Tadic said last week that he believed Mr Mladic’s 15 years on the run would come to an end.

“I believe that the arrest of Ratko Mladic is a matter of time... It is thankless to forecast when it will be but I hope it will be in a reasonable future,” Mr Tadic said.

But the chairman of Serbia’s national council for cooperation with the UN war crimes court, Rasim Ljajic, said yesterday he was not optimistic that the 68-year-old would be captured soon. “There have been different episodes. At different times we have had the impression that an arrest was close ... and it turned out to be wrong,” he told B92 radio. However, he insis-ted that the security forces were investing “a lot of effort, are working intensively and cooperating in an excellent manner”.

Serbia says it has made progress in the hunt for Mr Mladic, gradually cutting off a network of associates that he has relied on for shelter and financial help.

EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg yesterday formally agreed to call on the European Commission to offer its opinion on Belgrade’s bid to join the bloc – a first step in a country gaining formal status as an EU candidate.

Mr Mladic was indicted for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1995, wanted in the main for the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys, the worst single atrocity on European soil since World War II.