How war in Ukraine is just like the 1990s wars in the Balkans

And where they differ

Nationalist strongman inherits a massive army from the defunct communist federation. Fuelled by a highly selective reading of history, aided by the compliant state institutions, he starts a war with a neighbouring country whose territorial integrity he does not recognize because there are many people on the eastern part of the country that belong to his ethnic group. His cronies run the country’s major industries; the televisual media are mostly captured. International bodies and western countries introduce economic sanctions and cultural boycotts, which have a paradoxical effect of unifying the country and weakening the opposition even more.

This describes both Serbia & Milošević in 1990s and Russia & Putin in 2022. As irrational as it sounds, the main motive for Putin’s invasion is I think a certain historical vision of Russia and the romance of imperial nationhood. “The West” is a fascinating bogeyman that lives in Eastern European imaginations, which authoritarian political factors use to the maximum. (This is a war between the club of countries that hold gay pride parades, and those that refuse to affirm sin as just another way that humans behave, says the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill, in his Forgiveness Sunday sermon.)

I have some inkling what it must be like to be an anti-Putin citizen of Russia at this time. The economic sanctions will devastate the economy. But the expenditures don’t go down; health care system still needs to exist, subsidized education too, pensioners need their pensions, and there’ll be little revenue coming in. In 1990s Milošević & comp printed insane amounts of money which of course led to hyperinflation. A salary received in the morning was worthless by the afternoon, unless it was immediately converted to Deutsche Marks with your street dealer at the corner. I don’t expect Russia’s economy would collapse as quickly – Russia is still exporting gas etc. to a lot of places – but it’s probably on its way there. What are the Russians doing with their rubles, are they converting them, I wonder.

Airports with commercial flights went quiet, both then and now. If you intended to go anywhere from the Western Balkans, you would need a shuttle to Budapest (I took one too in October 1999 in order to fly to Canada). Banking system was in tatters (as I expect it is or will be in Russia) and cash will be rather kept under mattresses.

Did all this fuel the desire of Serbian citizens to withdraw their support from Milošević or the idea of a greater Serbia, stand firmly behind opposition and organize a massive peace movement to stop the expansionary wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo? Er, no. It won’t happen in Russia either.

But many things are different now. Europe was closing down in 1990s (while also unifying within itself with the Schengen protocol), and opposed to any idea of mass emigration. Refugees? There was no moral imperative to open any borders, the way it clearly feels there is one now, as there was one in 2015 after the Syrian wave of refugees. Social democratic governments (Blair, Schroeder in Germany, a Democrat about to be impeached due to his extramarital curriculum in the White House) later led the Nato campaign of bombing of the Serbian territories and of Montenegro. In one of those peculiar twists of history, Schroeder has, since retiring, become a shill for Putin’s energy interests in Germany.

There were more free media voices in Serbia under Milošević than there are today in Russia under Putin (or Serbia of today under Vučić). While in the post-Milošević era some things improved in the region, other regressed. Now that the media are privatized, the businessmen close to the Vučić government (or forced to be close, if they want to do business) have bought up all the media. Free market! as it’s called.

Pretty much from day one of the crisis in the Balkans the countries of the EU split and took sides. There was no joint European front. It wasn’t the best EU hour, the 1990s in the Balkans; the US-led Nato and its targeted bombing (with the inevitable misses and civilian casualties, not to mention the destruction of key infrastructure) was what finally put paid to the wars, but not to Milošević himself. The Dayton Peace accord that stopped the warring in Bosnia remains the shaky foundation of the country. Majority of Serbs and their politicians in the region still see the wars of 1990s, especially because they were lost with the help of western powers, as a western-led affront to the perennially victimized Serbs. There is a widespread feeling of historical injustice done unto this once-great nation – the version of which I’m sure exists among the Russians in 2022 too.

The EU unity that we’re seeing now, and the German reversal regarding defence funding and their expressed readiness to end the dependency on Russian gas and even reactivate some nuclear plants – this is very new. The willingness to welcome the refugees is also different. (If the war drags on, this willingness will diminish.)

In contrast with the conflicts in the Balkans, the Nato cannot get involved in the war with Russia in any direct way. It is helping Ukraine by schlepping arms, intel and expertise. During the Balkan wars, the official line was that the west stopped all arms sales to both sides of the conflict; “peace keeping” was still a thing – how quaint all that sounds now; whatever happened to peacekeeping as a concept? Hopefully it’s kaput. We’ve seen the worst side of it in the Balkans back then. It legitimizes the conquered territories by putting peacekeepers on new dividing lines of redrawn maps; it’s window dressing of the worst kind, cf Srebrenica. It also usually hides the fact that the arms trade rather continues, with whichever side you prefer.

What will happen in Ukraine, then? If we presume that the war will remain non-nuclear (let’s!) perhaps two types of situations are likeliest to happen: 1) a territory under occupation + the organized guerrilla resistance (cf partisans in the German-Italian occupied Yugoslavia in WW2) + reprisals after guerrilla actions, and 2) cities under siege, the way Sarajevo was in 1990s. OR! Ukraine, with all the intel and aid and state of the art arms and surveillance systems from the wealthy west, actually wins this thing? Maybe the Russian army somehow gets fatally weakened, its morale frayed, pro-Putin consensus in Russia itself broken.

The Nato bombing as the final phase of the Balkan wars did not topple Milošević and did not immediately weaken his grip over Serbia. But it was another crack, and a deepening one, on his reign. By October 2000 he was gone, in a post-electoral uprising after a botched attempt to rig the results. (With, credit where due, some significant US money going to the right people in Serbian resistence.) Putin is a different generation strongman, wilier and until recently more calculating. He will not be gone within a year. But this Ukraine business is beginning to look a lot like a crack.