The ignorant attitude towards the provisions of international public law relevant to the Balkan case resulted, therefore, in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the long wars in its two former federal units (Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) that took about 150,000 lives, produced more than two million displaced people and left behind a region to this day, almost three decades later, it has not politically stabilized and consolidated.

The West demonstrated an identical attitude towards the branch of law that it is ardently calling for these days concerning Ukraine, several years after the end of those wars, when it decided to actively engage in “protecting the endangered human rights of Kosovo Albanians” and “stopping the humanitarian catastrophe to which they were exposed”, as the official Western narrative was, explaining 78 days of the barbaric campaign of bombing Serbia and Montenegro in the spring of 1999. As we know, it ended with the complete physical destruction of the country and the de facto exclusion of Kosovo from its constitutional and legal framework of the Republic of Serbia.

The self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo in February 2008 was, as well as the aggression against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 contrary to all relevant customs of international public law. However, Western countries that today are leading in condemning similar Russian acts in Ukraine, were among the first to recognize the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo. 

Ukraine and the Balkans – Global ResearchGlobal Research – Centre for Research on Globalization