How the Kosovo Air War Foreshadowed the Crisis in Ukraine

This is a bizarre framing of the intervention in Yugoslavia that largely omits its intention, context, and history, other than a brief mention of "aiming to...put an end to anti-Albanian violence in the province of Kosovo." Serbian paramilitaries and security forces were in fact engaging in coordinated acts of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, including property seizure, rape, and massacres of civilians, then deliberately obstructing attempts by the international community to investigate or stabilize the situation. This was not propaganda or 'fake news'-- it was the reality on the ground. NATO's intervention, while not an unqualified triumph, was largely successful in halting this.

Strangely enough, in the years since, a loose coalition of international leftists have taken up the conspiratorial cause of Serbian recidivists and nationalists in declaring the NATO air campaign as an act of 'imperialism,' both unjustified and illegal. I can perhaps see why younger Serbians would be reluctant to see themselves as aggressors; it is harder to understand why Western leftists would take up the cause of someone as loathsome as Slobodan Milošević purely to make an ideological point.

Furthermore, if this intervention irked the Russians, it had very little to do with questions of international law and sovereignty, and much more to do with the fact that this area has long been seen by Moscow as its personal playground (famously, one of the primary causes of WW1), and signaled a blow to their declining prestige.

Finally, I would be wholly suspicious of any comparison of Yugoslavia to the current crisis in Ukraine, as it implies some legitimacy to Moscow's patently fictional claims of 'genocide' in the separatist areas in the east. Regardless of who 'forged the world in which such a war is possible,' this particular war is purely a creation of the Kremlin's grandiose and cruel imagination.

Cool, but no matter what happened in the past with NATO in the Balkans would not affect the revanchist claims nor Putin’s desire for conquest of Ukraine. The propaganda justifications would be different, but the war would be the same. I mean, they also call the Ukrainian government literal Nazis so it’s not like facts would get in the way of a good casus belli.