The Long Shadow of the 1999 Kosovo War

Abstract

As the Russian army began its assault on Ukraine on 24 February 2022, social media, commentators, and politicians in Russia, Serbia, and beyond, were quick to draw comparisons with NATO's intervention in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in March 1999.As with many other comparisons, good and bad alike, this one, too, helps make sense of, interpret, or position oneself in regard to the new conflict.The war in Kosovo, the focus of this special issue, plays a key role in these comparisons.In Russia, in particular for the regime of Vladimir Putin, the Kosovo War has been a central theme in both evoking the threat of NATO and justifying previous Russian interventions, whereas in Serbia, the NATO bombing has become an important myth serving to overshadow and marginalize the war crimes committed by the Milošević regime and its associates.The comparison and the link between the Kosovo War and the current war in Ukraine is thus fundamental both for understanding the logic of Putin's intervention in Ukraine and Serbia's position on the conflict.A key claim linking the two conflicts is that both wars were in breach of international law.The armed intervention by NATO, the argument goes, was not based on international law and the protection of Albanians in Kosovo was as much a "false flag" as the threat to Russians in Ukraine or the need to "denazify" the latter (Mikovic 2022).Consequently, the argument underlines that it was NATO that eroded international law in the first place, by violating the restrictions on waging war imposed by international law and the Charter of the United Nations.It is widely believed that this was then compounded by the recognition of Kosovo's independence nearly a decade later by most Western countries, despite the fact that the grounds for independence were precarious as the country Kosovo seceded from, Serbia, never accepted the former's independence.The underlying argument is that it was NATO and the West at the peak of the United States' unilateralism that changed the rules of the game.In fact, Putin and his proxies have been using this argument ever since, for example during the Russian intervention in Georgia in 2008 and the subsequent recognition of South

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