THE HAGUE (Agencies) - World leaders united in hailing Serbia Tuesday for the arrest of indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, with only Russia sounding a contrary note over whether he would receive a fair trial. Karadzic's arrest after a decade-long hunt is the equivalent of catching Europe's Osama bin Laden, US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement, said. He led the chorus of congratulations from around the globe telling reporters it was "a historic day". "One of the worst men in the world, the Osama bin Laden of Europe, has finally been captured. A major, major thug has been removed from the public scene." "He was at large because the Yugoslav army was protecting him. But this guy in my view was worse than Milosevic [Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic]... he was the intellectual leader," Holbrooke told CNN. David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary, said it would "pave the way for a brighter, European future for Serbia and the region." The White House released a statement congratulating the government of Serbia, and thanked the people who arrested Karadzic on a bus in Belgrade for their "professionalism and courage." Paddy Ashdown, the former international administrator in Bosnia, told the BBC that it was a "longed hoped for day." "The four years that I was working with Nato to try and catch him were peppered by rumours of where he was - in this cafe, on that mountain, in this valley." Video Watch Karadzic's lawyer slam arrest " Ashdown also told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper that it was a "major breakthrough for the Balkans region." In Brussels, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, sounded hopeful that the arrest would unblock Serbia's EU accession talks, which had been made conditional on Belgrade's cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). "We have to talk to the prosecutor of the international tribunal but I am almost certain he is going to say there is 'full cooperation'," Solana said. That reaction was echoed across European capitals, the United Nations and the White House, but with a dissident note coming from Russia's envoy to Nato, who called for Western leaders to join Karadzic in the dock. "If the Karadzic case merits being considered in the Hague, then next to him in the dock should be those who took the decision to bomb entirely innocent people, hundreds of whom died during the 'democratisation' of the Balkans by the West," Dmitry Rogozin said in Brussels, cited by Interfax news agency. The Russian Foreign Ministry meanwhile stressed that any trial should be "impartial," accusing the UN war crimes tribunal of "an often biased approach" and said it should be disbanded. Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, who served as a mediator in the Balkans conflict, hailed the capture of Karadzic as "late, late, late, but good, good, good," in comments to Swedish Radio. The EU's current French presidency said it marked "an important step on the way to Serbia's drawing nearer to the European Union." "At last. We've been waiting for 13 years for this," crowed French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. "This is certainly a good thing for rapprochement between Serbia and the European Union." Spain's Defence Minister Carme Chacon congratulated Serbian President Boris Tadic over the operation, which showed there is "zero impunity for genocide" and that "no human rights violations in any part of the world will remain unpunished." The US congratulated the government of Serbia on the capturing Karadzic, calling his arrest a "tribute" to the victims of atrocities there. "The timing of the arrest, only days after the commemoration of the massacre of over 7,000 Bosnians committed in Srebrenica, is particularly appropriate," a White House statement read.  United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed the arrest as an "historic moment for the victims." Amnesty International said the capture was "a major victory" but called for the 2010 cut-off point for the tribunal that will consider his fate to be reconsidered by the UN Security Council.