The International Court of Justice has ruled that Serbia and Croatia did not commit acts of genocide against each other during the Croatian war of secession from Yugoslavia.
The Croatian government had alleged that Serbia committed genocide in the town of Vukovar and elsewhere in 1991.
Serbia later filed a counter-claim over the expulsion of more than 200,000 Serbs from Croatia.
About 20,000 people died during the 1991-1995 war, mostly Croatians.
The Croatian town of Vukovar was devastated when it was occupied by Serbs for three months in 1991. Tens of thousands of ethnic Croats were displaced, and about 260 Croat men were detained and killed.
Four years later, the Croatian military's Operation Storm bombarded the majority ethnic-Serb Krajina area, forcing about 200,000 people from their homes.
Speaking in court on Tuesday, Judge Peter Tomka dismissed both the Croatian claim and the Serbian counter-claim.
Forces on both sides had carried out violent acts during the war, Judge Tomka said. However, neither side had provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate the "specific intent required for acts of genocide".
UN 1948 Genocide Convention- Act committed with intent to destroy in whole or part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring physical destruction
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Croatia filed its initial case with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) - the top UN court - in 1999, accusing Serbs, led by President Slobodan Milosevic, of targeting ethnic Croats during the conflict.
It wanted Serbia to pay compensation for damages "to persons and properties as well as to the Croatian economy and environment".
In 2010, Serbia responded to Croatia's case with a countersuit, saying that ethnics Serbs were expelled when Croatia launched its 1995 operation to retake territory captured by Serbs.
The BBC's Anna Holligan in The Hague says although genocide is the most serious of international crimes, it is also the hardest to prove.
'End of a process'
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Anna Holligan explains the background to the cases being heard at the ICJ
Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dacic earlier described the verdict as "one of perhaps the most important events for our bilateral relations with Croatia".
"It will probably be the end of a process that has lasted for 15-20 years [and] will put an end to both sides' fight to prove who the worst criminal is," he told reporters on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Croatian Justice Minister Orsat Miljenic has previously said that the government's main goal is to "present what happened in the war and that was aggression against Croatia".
"Expectations have already been met" through the case being discussed at the ICJ, Mr Miljenic added.
Relations between the two countries have improved in recent years but in 2012 Serbia was outraged when Operation Storm commander Ante Gotovina, was cleared on appeal by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Last week, ahead of the verdict, Vukovar resident Kata Lozancic told Reuters news agency that she believed genocide had taken place in her town.
"Everything from cultural and natural sites, to people, everything was destroyed," she said. "The town and its vicinity are full of former camp sites, places where they held people in detention, searched them, tortured them."
Meanwhile, a refugee in Serbia, identified only as Dragica, expressed unhappiness at the Croatian government's claims.
"They expelled us Serbs, and now they [claim they] are not criminals, and we are," she told Reuters.
"[They say] we ran away... [but] who would be crazy enough to run away from their own home, leaving everything behind, everything we worked so hard for."
Former Yugoslavia was a Socialist state created after World War Two. It consisted of six republics: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
The federation began falling apart in the early 1990s. Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia declared independence, sparking conflicts with the Serb-dominated Yugoslav army. All four countries were eventually recognised as independent by the UN.
In 2006, Montenegro also emerged as a sovereign state after a referendum for independence, ending the former Union of Serbia and Montenegro.
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