David Binder, a longtime correspondent for The New York Times who chronicled the Cold War in Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc in the East and the horrific civil wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, died on Sunday at his home in Evanston, Ill. He was 88.

His wife, Helga, said the cause was end-stage kidney disease.

A restless, relentless journalist, Mr. Binder covered the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961 and its destruction in 1989 — bookends to his many hundreds of reports on East-West tensions and life under the Communist regimes in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.

In the early 1990s, as Germany reunified and peace returned to much of Europe, Mr. Binder went back to the Balkans to cover wars that engulfed the former Yugoslavia in massacres, mass rapes and genocide, killing 100,000 people and driving millions from their homes. He interviewed civilian victims, fighters and their leaders, including the accused Serbian war criminals Slobodan Milosevic and Gen. Ratko Mladic.

Mr. Milosevic, a former president of Serbia, died in prison in 2006, and General Mladic was convicted in 2017 of crimes against humanity and genocide and sentenced to life in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.