On February 17, 2008, a gaggle of US-backed “democratic leaders” headed by a former Western-sponsored terrorist declared the independence of Serbia’s breakaway province of Kosovo and Metohija (its full authorized identify underneath Serbia’s structure).

It appeared oh so easy and easy on the zenith of the “unipolar second,” and Kosovo Albanians have been “confidently awaiting Western recognition for his or her state regardless of the anger its secession provoked in Serbia and Russia’s warnings of contemporary Balkan unrest,” as a Reuters report drily famous.

Their confidence was greater than justified, as 22 of 27 EU and 26 of 30 NATO member states ultimately acknowledged this unilateral act of secession, pulling alongside many different smaller, principally Western-dependent international locations to observe go well with. UN Safety Council Decision 1244, in response to which the province is to stay an autonomous province of Serbia pending a mutually agreed remaining settlement, was ignored, simply because the UN and worldwide legislation have been ignored within the spring of 1999, when NATO unilaterally engaged in a 78-day bombing marketing campaign towards the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, underneath the acquainted pretext of defending “democracy, human rights and the rule of legislation.” This resulted in NATO’s army occupation of the province that lasts to at the present time.

The case of “unbiased Kosovo” is in some ways the proper embodiment of the post-Chilly Struggle West’s “rules-based order.” In distinction to worldwide legislation, which derives from the UN Constitution and quite a few universally accepted post-WWII treaties and agreements, the “rules-based order” is just about something its propagators deem it to be in accordance with their political pursuits du jour. As Russian Overseas Minister Sergey Lavrov put it, these “guidelines” are “created from scratch for every explicit case. They’re written inside a slim circle of Western international locations and palmed off as the last word reality.”

Within the case of Kosovo and Metohija, the “guidelines” have been to be tailor-made to the ambitions of the unipolar hegemon and its vassals. This fashioned the bottom of the collective West’s failed try to declare this occasion sui generis, i.e., distinctive and incomparable to some other case, so as to forestall others from referring to it as a precedent – South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Crimea, the Donbass, and the Kherson and Zaporozhye areas, amongst others, begged to vary. And, no, the unique purpose of this distinctive “rule-setting” was to not shield “democracy, human rights and the rule of legislation” in Serbia’s historic province, which hosts not solely the positioning of the legendary Battle of Kosovo of 1389, the one battle through which an Ottoman sultan was killed, but additionally a whole bunch of Serbian Orthodox medieval church buildings and monasteries. The true US curiosity was a lot larger and fewer benevolent. And it was revealed in a doc memory-holed by Western mainstream media, a Could 2000 letter to then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder by Willy Wimmer, a member of the German Bundestag and vice chairman of the Parliamentary Meeting of the OSCE.

Wimmer’s letter comprises an outline of a safety convention that he had attended within the Slovakian capital of Bratislava that was co-organized by the US State Division and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based suppose tank. A listing of members and the agenda might at one time be discovered on the AEI web site however are not accessible on the time of writing. Virtually the entire data accessible these days about it comes from Wimmer’s account. In response to him, the convention not solely uncovered the true causes of NATO’s brutal assault on Yugoslavia and subsequent occupation of Kosovo and Metohija, but additionally the aim behind NATO’s additional enlargement towards the borders of Russia, and, most significantly from the side of world safety, the US purpose of undermining the worldwide authorized order as a part of its drive for international domination. In essence, Wimmer’s report revealed the felony plan that has introduced the world to the brink of world, probably nuclear, battle.

In response to senior US officers on the convention as cited by Wimmer, Yugoslavia was bombed “so as to rectify Normal Eisenhower’s inaccurate resolution throughout World Struggle II,” when he did not station US troops there. Naturally, as Wimmer recorded, nobody on the convention disputed the declare that, having engaged within the bombing of a sovereign nation, “NATO violated all worldwide guidelines, and particularly all of the related provisions of worldwide legislation.” Moreover, NATO’s unilateral intervention outdoors its authorized area represented a deliberate “precedent, to be invoked by anybody at any time,” and “many others” sooner or later.

The last word imperial objectives have been clearly said: “To revive the territorial state of affairs within the space between the Baltic Sea and Anatolia resembling existed through the Roman Empire, on the time of its biggest energy and biggest territorial enlargement. For that reason, Poland have to be flanked to the north and to the south with democratic neighbor states, whereas Romania and Bulgaria are to safe a land reference to Turkey. Serbia (in all probability for the needs of securing an unhindered US army presence) have to be completely excluded from European growth. North of Poland, whole management over St. Petersburg’s entry to the Baltic Sea have to be established. In all processes, peoples’ rights to self-determination needs to be favored over all different provisions or guidelines of worldwide legislation.”

In brief, the tragedy that’s unfolding in Ukraine right this moment may be clearly traced again to NATO’s trampling of worldwide legislation within the case of Kosovo and the “victorious” West’s constructing of a brand new (“rules-based”) order by increasing its army alliance all the best way to Russia’s borders. If we have been to use the Nuremberg Ideas of Worldwide Regulation formulated underneath UN Normal Meeting Decision 177 on the idea of the post-WW II Nazi warfare crimes trials, NATO’s decision-makers would stand an excellent probability of being discovered responsible of crimes towards peace: “(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a warfare of aggression or a warfare in violation of worldwide treaties, agreements or assurances,” and “(ii) Participation in a typical plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts talked about underneath (i).”

In different phrases, worldwide legislation is inconvenient for right this moment’s collective West not only for sensible however for authorized and ethical causes. To not communicate of the plain historic parallels with a earlier militaristic try at forming a “new order” that led to a Berlin bunker after tens of thousands and thousands of lives have been extinguished. Wimmer’s (nearly) forgotten correspondence is an indictment far deeper than the collective West’s present marriage of comfort with Kiev’s neo-Nazi aspect.

Nevertheless, even because the Ukraine disaster continues to escalate, the brand new Battle of Kosovo is much from over. As a result of, 15 years on, the collective West nonetheless hasn’t been capable of finding a political confederate in Belgrade able to grant it retroactive amnesty by recognizing “unbiased Kosovo” and/or agreeing to its UN membership. That’s the reason, at the same time as they stubbornly press on with the most recent Drang nach Osten on the army discipline, Western powers are additionally doubling down on their diplomatic strain on Serbia, which not solely refuses to formally acknowledge its personal dismemberment but additionally to be a part of the unlawful sanctions towards Russia. The newest ploy, informally known as the Franco-German plan, is to attempt to pressure Serbia to acknowledge its province’s statehood in all however identify, in return for foggy guarantees of monetary support and (distant) future EU membership. In consequence, the present onslaught of Western diplomats on Belgrade is just barely much less intense than the parallel influx of Western mercenaries to Kiev.

The issue for the collective West is that, regardless of its intense, decades-long strain, substantial funding within the Serbian media and NGO sector, and threats of renewed worldwide isolation, Serbian common opinion stays stubbornly independent-minded. In response to a latest report by the uber hawkish, London-based Henry Jackson Society, 53.3% of Serbian residents want their nation to stay impartial within the Ukraine battle (with an extra 35.8% supporting an overtly pro-Russian stance), whereas 78.7% oppose sanctions towards Russia and 54.1% suppose that Serbia ought to depend on Russia first with regards to international coverage (versus 22.6% choosing reliance on the EU). Moreover, the EU has undoubtedly misplaced its luster, with 44.3% saying they might “undoubtedly” or “in all probability” vote towards EU membership (versus 38.1% able to vote for) if a referendum have been to be held tomorrow. Lastly, in response to a lately launched unbiased Serbian ballot, 79.2% oppose EU membership as a “reward” for recognizing independence for Kosovo.

It could possibly thus be argued that, a lot as Hitler’s march into the Rhineland broke the post-WW I world order, NATO’s unprovoked assault on Yugoslavia in 1999 was a deliberate transfer to destroy the post-Chilly Struggle order, whereas the Western-inspired declaration of Kosovo’s independence 15 years in the past was an try to legitimize a brand new, “rules-based” order, which is now reaching its ugly end result in Ukraine. And, taking the parallels a bit additional, simply because the tried new order could meet its army Stalingrad in Ukraine, it would meet its diplomatic Stalingrad in Kosovo, properly earlier than the twentieth anniversary of that occupied territory’s purported independence.