By CHRIS REDMAN /EDITOR TIME ATLANTIC

orrespondent Massimo Calabresi had barely settled into his posting in Vienna in 1995 when he found out what covering the Balkans might entail. One week after he had filed his first story from TIME's Central European bureau, Croatia launched its drive to recover territory lost to Serb rebels early in the Yugoslav hostilities. Calabresi recalls, "From that point on, there were eight months straight of convulsions, with the most territorial changes since the first six months of the war and the biggest massacre in Europe since World War II." Not only did Serb soldiers execute thousands of civilians in the isolated Bosnian Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, but mass population shifts from the offensives began sorting out boundaries for a peace settlement brokered by the U.S. late in the year.

In his first six months on the job, Calabresi had reporting bylines on more cover stories than TIME had run on Bosnia during the previous three years of war. For much of that period he was working out of Sarajevo, entering and leaving the besieged Bosnian capital by way of a twisting, dangerously exposed road across Mount Igman. "It was an absolutely hellish track," he says. "People would just drive right off the road trying to negotiate the turns." His sure-footedness in such terrain has a new test now that Balkan history is going through another lethal twist. As Serbia's explosive province of Kosovo propels the region to the top of the news once more, Calabresi's excellence in coverage is one of the conflict's few certainties.

Throwing himself into challenges is in his nature. The son of a Yale Law School professor, he earned a degree in philosophy at Yale. "But then I decided I didn't want to be a philosopher, so I rode a motorcycle across Africa and then got a job teaching in Jakarta"--where, he admits, what he taught best was playing poker. Opting for journalism as an ideal career, he went to Moscow in 1991 to free-lance, arriving just before the failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. His room overlooking Russia's White House gave him a perfect perch for reporting Boris Yeltsin's showdown with the coup-makers. He joined TIME in its New York bureau in May 1993. What will happen in Kosovo? Calabresi reflects, "It certainly offers no easy solution. In some ways, it's even more intractable than Bosnia was." We will be counting on Calabresi to keep readers abreast of whatever happens.