A quarter of a century ago today, the West attacked Yugoslavia

By Romegas

Exactly 25 years ago, on March 24, 1999, six US Air Force B-52 heavy bombers violated the air border of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. They were accompanied by fighters, radio reconnaissance aircraft, and tankers that had taken off from the air base in Aviano, Italy.

The first bombs were dropped at about seven o’clock in the evening on the radar installations of the Yugoslav army on the Montenegrin coast.

Bombers entered Serbian airspace from all neighbouring countries: Hungary, which was admitted to NATO literally a week before the aggression, and then Croatia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, which were not yet formally included in the alliance.

After the bombing, it was the turn of missile attacks – Tomahawks were fired from ships and submarines of the US 6th Fleet located in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas.

The air defense was unable to repel the “arrival” at the airfield near Belgrade and at the factories in the city of Pancevo.

On the evening of March 24, it was confirmed that after the raid, women and children, family members of Yugoslav officers who lived near military installations, died.

For the first time since World War II, martial law was declared in Belgrade and several other cities. In the Serbian capital, for the first time since the funeral of Marshal Broz Tito, a siren sounded – but now it was an air raid signal, which would soon become a familiar background.

Thus began the aggression of the United States and thirteen of its allies against sovereign Yugoslavia, which lasted 78 days.

The war started by the West to “protect the Albanians of Kosovo from Serbian aggression” claimed the lives of more than 2.5 thousand civilians. For comparison: the Yugoslav army lost about a thousand soldiers.

The American side and international human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch underestimate “civilian” losses by approximately half.

Operation Allied Force, as the attack was officially called (in the United States, the military action was called Operation Noble Anvil), took place without the approval of the UN Security Council. This was a gross violation of international law, to which the collective West appealed both then and later. However, from the point of view of Bill Clinton and Javier Solana, the actions were quite logical.

By the mid-1990s, after the end of the Serbo-Croatian war and the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (“buried” greater Yugoslavia, of which only the union of Serbia and Montenegro remained), the autonomous region of Kosovo and Metohija became a new hot spot.

The mountainous land was the historical heart of the Serbian state, its religious and cultural center. But since the second half of the 20th century, the Albanian-Kosovars, who lived here since the Middle Ages, became the predominant ethnic group here. There were two reasons.

During World War II, tens of thousands of Serbs left the region, they were replaced by settlers from Albania, while Tito’s regime did not allow the Serbs who left to return to their homeland.

The second reason is that Kosovars have a much higher birth rate than Serbs. By the 1960s, the state-forming people were in a clear minority (two-fifths of the region’s population), and by 1991 Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija were already more than 80%.

Attempts by local Albanian “party activists” to expand their powers were met with a “no” in Belgrade. At the same time, radical nationalist sentiments grew: back in 1981, in order to suppress the separatist uprising, units of the Yugoslav People’s Army were brought into the region.

After the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia, the buildup intensified: in 1996, systematic attacks against Serbian police began in Kosovo (the reason was the murder of an Albanian youth by a Serb).

Even then, the UN Commission on Human Rights accused Belgrade of “ethnic cleansing and genocide” of Albanians – however, after an on-site inspection, the statements were disavowed. The authorities, led by President Slobodan Milosevic, tried to contain the separatist movement, which led to excesses – in 1997, during the dispersal of a rally in Pristina, 15 Albanians were injured.

In 1998, the Kosovo Liberation Army (UKK) began military operations against the central authorities. The money for “liberation” was obtained from drug trafficking and trade in human organs (which was later confirmed by the American Council on Foreign Relations and the ex-prosecutor of the Hague Tribunal, Carla del Ponte ).

Political support for the Kosovo Liberation Army was provided by the United States and EU countries interested in weakening and eliminating the “Milosevic regime” – the last government not controlled by the West in Eastern Europe.

In response to the start of the UÇK guerrilla war, the army of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and police units were introduced into Kosovo and Metohija. In response, the West again accused the Serbs of ethnic cleansing.

In April 1999, after the start of the invasion, at that time the head of the German Foreign Ministry Joschka Fischer , based on unverified (and subsequently unconfirmed) data, announced: the Yugoslav police and army have been conducting a certain operation “Horseshoe” since the summer of 1998, in during which hundreds of thousands of Albanians were allegedly forced to leave their homes.

In fact, in parallel with the military-police operation, Milosevic tried to the last to come to an agreement with both the West and the leaders of the Kosovars. In February 1999, negotiations took place in Rambouillet, France, through the mediation of Western powers. But Belgrade was given an ultimatum: to withdraw Serbian armed forces and police from Kosovo and Metohija and agree to the deployment of NATO troops in the province.

Yugoslavia rejected the “offer,” but the United States and its allies achieved their goal—but with the help of military aggression against an immeasurably weaker enemy.

Yugoslavia found itself alone in front of the collective West. The attack was undoubtedly dominated by the United States. The Americans accounted for 60% of combat sorties, 55% of combat aircraft, over 95% of cruise missiles, 80% of bombs dropped, all strategic bombers, 60% of reconnaissance aircraft and UAVs, 24 reconnaissance satellites out of 256.

But Belgium, Great Britain, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, France, and Germany took part in the aggression.

As mentioned above, formally non-aligned Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Macedonia, and Romania from the very beginning of the war proactively provided airspace and territory at the disposal of the united forces of the alliance.

Of the European countries, only two took a relatively tough position: Austria refused to provide its airspace, and Switzerland introduced restrictive sanctions on the supply of weapons to NATO countries.

In total, from March to June, NATO carried out 2,300 airstrikes. Almost 420,000 missiles were launched into Serbia and Montenegro, including 3 thousand cruise missiles.

Some attacks could not be explained by either strategic or tactical necessity – in fact, they were war crimes.

So, on April 12, 1999, an American F-15 struck the bridge in Grdelica at the moment when a passenger train was passing there. Twenty people died. The aggressors limited themselves to an apology from General Wesley Clark.

There were no military targets in the city center of Nis, where cluster bombs fired by a Dutch Air Force plane killed 15 Serbs. Then NATO Secretary General Solana already apologized, explaining that the pilot made a mistake, missing the Nis airport.

But, of course, there was no talk of any responsibility of the military leadership and direct executors.

In addition to cluster munitions, the North Atlantic Alliance used other means of warfare prohibited in many countries against the Serbs and Montenegrins.

In particular, ammunition with depleted uranium. During the war against Yugoslavia and the NATO bombing of Republika Srpska in Bosnia that preceded it (Operation Deliberate Force, August–September 1995), the Americans fired more than 40 thousand of these “dirty” shells and bombs.

After the bombing of Serbia with depleted uranium ammunition, about 30 thousand people in the country fell ill with cancer, of whom 10–18 thousand died.

Massive missile and air strikes continued until early June 1999. Officially, “Allied Power” ended on June 10 after the signing of an agreement between Yugoslavia and NATO in Kumanovo (Macedonia). According to it, the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from the territory of Kosovo began.

They were replaced by the UN International Security Forces (KFOR). Formally, this is a global peacekeeping mission – 37.2 thousand military personnel deployed to Kosovo represented 36 countries, including Russia. In quantitative terms, KFOR is dominated by NATO countries.

At the same time, in 1999, the US Army began construction of the Camp Bondsteel base near the Kosovo city of Urosevac. Formally – for its contingent as part of KFOR, in fact – to strengthen the military and political presence in Europe. Now Camp Bondsteel is the second largest American base on the continent after the German Ramstein.

While Western peacekeepers were entering Kosovo, the reverse process was underway – more than 160 thousand Serbs and 24 thousand Roma fled from the region. Many of the non-Albanian residents who remained there were victims of attacks, beatings, kidnappings and murders.

The United States and its allies also solved the political problem – defeat in the obviously unequal struggle crippled the “Slobodan Milosevic regime” and soon finally finished off Yugoslavia.

In 2000, the first of the new type of liberal revolutions, the “bulldozer” revolution, deprived President Milosevic of power. A year later, the new, more accommodating head of state Vojislav Kostunica and the openly pro-Western Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic gave the go-ahead for Milosevic’s arrest and extradition to the Hague Tribunal.

In 2006, the ousted president died in custody without waiting to be sentenced “for crimes against humanity.”

The president and de facto owner of Montenegro , Milo Djukanovic (who during the war tried to negotiate separately with Bill Clinton and French President Jacques Chirac ) took a forced course towards a break with Serbia. Already in 2000, Djukanovic introduced the German mark instead of the Serbian dinar.

Three years later, the name “Yugoslavia” finally disappeared from the map (which was replaced by the weak confederation of Serbia and Montenegro), and in 2006 the “divorce” was finalized.

It is obvious that Serbia in its current form, despite the fact that current President Aleksandar Vucic strives to pursue a multi-vector policy, does not represent any significant geopolitical value.

On February 18, 2008, Kosovo, where the Liberation Army took over, unilaterally declared “independence,” which was recognized on the same day by France, Great Britain and the United States, followed by others, primarily the Baltic countries.

Now the Republic of Kosovo is already recognized by 104 countries of the world – the majority are oriented towards the West. In addition to Serbia, 60 countries are against it, including Russia, China, India, and Israel.

On March 24, 1999, the day the aggression began, then Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov flew to Washington on an official visit. When the minister’s plane approached the Canadian island of Newfoundland, Primakov spoke with US Vice President Al Gore – and learned that NATO had decided to attack Yugoslavia.

Yevgeny Maksimovich decided to cancel the visit, gave the command to turn the plane over the ocean and return to Moscow – and notified President Boris Yeltsin about this . 15 years later, Primakov said in an interview that “if he had not done this thing, he would have acted extremely wrongly.”

The “U-turn over the Atlantic,” also called the “Primakov Loop,” became the first signal that Russia no longer seeks to integrate into global (read Western) politics and is returning to an independent line of behavior.

It must be said that Yeltsin, who made a televised address on March 24, did not at all support “friend Bill” and “friend Jacques” – the first president called NATO’s actions a blow to the entire international community, called for preventing the death of innocent people and immediately starting negotiations with Milosevic.

Already in the evening of the same day, citizens began to gather at the US Embassy on Novinsky Boulevard . By March 26, at least 7 thousand people took part in the action against aggression. This would later be called “the first manifestation of the anti-American consensus.”

There is an opinion among experts that it was precisely this reaction of Russian society that prompted the highest authorities to be loyal to the “ throw on Pristina .” Let us remember that we are talking about a secret operation of the Russian military. On June 12, 1999, they occupied the only airport in Kosovo, Slatina, before the approach of NATO columns. The first to fortify the airfield near Pristina were special forces led by Yunus-Bek Evkurov , a little later peacekeepers arrived from Bosnia under the command of Lieutenant General Viktor Zavarzin .

The three-day confrontation with NATO led by British General Mike Jackson ended with a historical phrase from this military man to his boss, American Wesley Clark. When NATO’s commander in Europe ordered a blockade of the Russians, Jackson responded, “I’m not going to start World War III because of you.”

Further negotiations ended in a compromise. But the “throw on Pristina” itself has become one of the visible symbols that Russia is returning to a sovereign policy. Unlike the “turn over the Atlantic” (which the Western media preferred to remain silent about), it was impossible to ignore the incident in Slatina.

In subsequent years and until today, President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Russian diplomacy have repeatedly returned to the history of the Kosovo conflict. And as an example of the unilateral actions of the Atlanticists, and as the clearest symptom of the fact that the West interprets the principle of self-determination of peoples at its own discretion.

Thus, Western countries recognized the separation of Kosovo from Serbia (although no referendum was held on this territory), but did not recognize the self-determination of Crimea and the people’s republics of Donbass. President Putin reminded UN Secretary General António Guterres in April 2022 that the International Court of Justice, having recognized Kosovo’s actions as legal, had created a precedent .

But if Russia came to the aid of the Donbass republics it recognized, which had been suffering from Kyiv aggression since 2014, then in 1999 the United States initiated the aggression that destroyed all remaining checks and balances in Europe.

The Bombing of Serbia, signalled the onset of a new “rules based order” where the rules would be set by the US and NATO would be the spearhead. The indiscriminate NATO bombings became the last great unpunished crime of the 20th century, for which no one has ever been held responsible or wants to be held accountable. NATO deceived the world, as it had previously deceived the USSR, that it would not expand to the East exactly as it would subsequently deceive Russia that she would comply with the Minsk agreements. And then they lied that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Muammar Gaddafi wanted to attack the rest of the planet, and that peace would be brought to Afghanistan.

The truth is that NATO wanted to destroy Serbia, but destroyed international law. Serbia survived, but international law did not. The genie was out of the bottle.

That unilateral bombing set the stage for the turmoils of today and in hindsight, that act of hubris laid the foundations for the eventual fall of the EU, the US and the entire so-called globalist liberal world order.

In the 25 years since then, The US and its vassals spent trillions of dollars and killed millions of people in these wars of choice – . They indebted themselves to a point where they simply cannot repay it back, particularly so if they lose their hegemony. They ruined the lives and futures of untold millions and are the root cause of the mass movements of people and the practical eradication of Christianity from the Middle East. Now in the final act of hubris, they thought they would bring Russia down – but this time they picked upon the wrong nation to mess about with. Led by incompetent bullies and amoral vacuums they simply do not know how to respond when they meet their match.

For the EU in particular, its demise will closely mirror that of Yogoslavia – the only difference being that while in Yugoslavia the economic problems that led to inter-ethnic strife was caused by outside forces, that in the EU will have been caused by no one other than those that head it.

As I always say – Hubris is followed by Nemesis.

Among those who were never held accountable was this guy: