Teslio

This question was arisen by the March article in The Intercept. The author compares the Ukrainian war to the NATO military operation in Yugoslavia. Actually, this comparison isn’t for the Alliance from the moral and ethical point of view. Nowadays this article is especially popular while Russia is systematically hitting the Ukrainian energy facilities and infrastructure just like in 1999 NATO forces were doing.

Both invasions were exonerated the same way: stop the bloodshed of Kosovo Albanians at one case and of Donetsk and Luhansk residents at another. The aim is to downgrade Milosevic’s military potential to make him unable dictating his wishes to Kosovo said the United States Senator from Delaware of that time Joseph Biden in Congress.

The Alliance representatives justified destroying energy infrastructure the same way. On the 4^th May 1999 NATO spokesman Jamie Shea said that “and the fact that the lights went out across 70% of the country I think shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch in Yugoslavia now and we can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to. We realize of course the inconvenience that may be caused to the Yugoslav people, but it is up to Milosevic to decide how he wishes to use his remaining energy sources – on his tanks or on his people”.

3 weeks later he concretized the aims of such strikes: “if President Milosevic really wants all of his population to have water and electricity all he has to do is accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop this campaign”. All these sounds like the Kremlin propaganda. Just replace Milosevic to Zielenskyy and NATO to Russia – there will be no difference, the idea will be the same.

NATO’s officials lied just like the Putin’s propagandists. NATO representative Peter Daniel in the interview to the Washington Post claimed that military planes didn’t attack the Yugoslavian water supply system and main power plants. The biggest Serbian Nikola Tesla Thermal Power Plant would have argued with this statement if it could, of course.

Today everything is vice versa. The entire Western world supports Ukraine and the Ukrainian people are immeasurably thankful to them. Fortunately, the world has changed for 23 years and policy of “a firm power” doesn’t work. The civilized world realizes this so nobody supported the war which Russia unleashed.

However, at this time the situation is embarrassing. People who used to advocate aggression against the same country in Eastern Europe, and to justify infrastructure destroying nowadays are in our team. The Secretary of State Antony Blinken was a Bill Clinton’s speech-writer. He wrote speeches in which the American leader convinced his nation in necessity of a military operation against Milosevic’s regime. Now Blinken calls Russian hits on energy facilities “barbaric” and blames Putin for using “winter as a weapon”.

It’s worth to admit that there is only one little step from an adaptable political position to double standards. On the one hand, Russia is a State Sponsor of Terrorism which is under the sanctions. On the other hand, it is one of the main energy sources for the EU. For example, the Ukrainian politician Oleksiy Honcharenko calls for transit ban for Russian hydrocarbons because these days Russia earns on energy resources export more than it used to do before invasion. And it’s undoubtedly. What’s more, he even supports Kosovo independence.

Moreover, the recent prisoner exchange of American basketball player Brittney Griner and one of the most famous arms dealers Viktor Bout is quite surprising. Obviously, this exchange is unequal and not in the US interests. Why did the USA agree to this deal and what did Moscow offer is a secret. But that’s not what allies and partners waited from America.

And there we came to the most important question: where is a limit of Washington’s policy “flexibility”? May it be that everything depends on the current situation and economic benefit for the American business and the White House’s position can change cardinally from all-round assistance to political betrayal? Even more, such precedents have already been. Saigon in 1975 and Kabul in 2021 are really good examples.

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