By the Russian Ambassador to Serbia, H.E. Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko
“Serbia is still showing interest in the subject of the so-called Kosovo precedent. There is a thesis that Russia allegedly took advantage of the “sovereignization” of Kosovo, and that it is even beneficial for it. I am confident there is only a single goal in this – to bring discord into our relations with Serbia. But our approach is fair and open. We don’t need to hide behind “precedent”.
All you need to do is to carefully read the statements made by the President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to understand that the Russian leadership puts the protection of Russia’s national interests ahead of everything else, thus ensuring the safety of our homeland and its people, and strictly follows international law in its actions. We start from the same premise in the context of solving the Kosovo issue. Russia’s position is unchanging – a just solution should be sought in the dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina, under the auspices of the international legal framework defined in Resolution 1244 of the UN Security Council.
The Kosovo precedent, an infectious example of self-proclaimed “independence”, is certainly a fact. I remember that, after resolving the Kosovo issue, our former Western partners, primarily the USA, demanded to collectively establish Kosovo as a “unique case” (sui generis), despite the logic of real life, and in the spirit of their corrupt concept of “order, based on rules “, that is on the rules arbitrarily determined by the West. Then, in 2007, we categorically came out against it, warning of possible harmful consequences for European and international security.
However, I would like to warn that possible superficial analogies are risky and insensible. Let me point out that the “case of Kosovo” is fundamentally different from the situation around Donbas.
For eight years, several million inhabitants of Donbas lived in constant fear due to regular artillery attacks, social-economic and humanitarian blockades by the regime in Kyiv, which in 2014, won power in Ukraine after an unconstitutional armed coup. Furthermore, Ukrainian leaders, controlled by the West, in every way sabotaged the fulfilment of the Minsk agreements, which provided for a special status for Donbas. However they later publicly admitted that they only needed the agreements with Donetsk and Luhansk to buy time, to get as many weapons as possible from the “western partners” and to prepare for the violent “reintegration” of the region similar to that carried out by the official Zagreb – a scenario joint military-police operation called “The Storm” (“Oluja”) in August 1995, which resulted in the expulsion of more than 250,000 Serbs from Croatia.
Kyiv has turned Russophobia and neo-Nazism into state policy. In those tragic conditions, the realization of the fundamental rights of the population of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, Zaporizhye and Kherson Oblasts was not achievable. As a result, after the liberation of those territories during a special military operation carried out in accordance with the UN Charter, decisions were made to hold national referendums there on reunification with Russia.
Belgrade, on the other hand, was resolutely fighting in the second half of the 1990s against the bandit-like formations of the terrorist organization Kosovo Liberation Army (whose crimes are currently being investigated by the Special Court in The Hague), consistently advocated for a sustainable international legal solution to the Kosovo issue and was ready to give the province a wide autonomy. Regardless, in 1999, a group of NATO countries, who were never sanctioned by the UN Security Council, under the false pretext of the Yugoslav authorities “killing civilians” in Racak, started an armed aggression against Yugoslavia, a sovereign and independent state that had a legitimately elected leadership (Yugoslavia never represented, and could not represent, a real threat to NATO!). For Washington and its satellites, the one who is right is not the one who is really right, but the one who appropriated the rights to himself, a favourite neo-colonial practice. The Alliance did not even stop at the fact that missiles with depleted uranium were used during the barbaric bombings.
In 2008, when Pristina, despite the intense negotiations that were underway, unilaterally declared, with the support of Western patrons, its “statehood”, there were no risks to the security of Kosovo Albanians. Actually, it was the other way around. Let’s remember the brutal pogroms of the Serbian population of Kosovo and Metohija in 2004, the constant acts of terrorism against the Serbs in the north of the province and in the enclaves south of the Ibar River, as well as the attacks on the Orthodox Church heritage of Kosovo and Metohija, including the holy places under the protection of UNESCO. Discrimination against provincial Serbs, and in fact gradual ethnic cleansing, continues to this day. Among other things, Pristina did not fulfil its obligation to form the Union of Serbian Municipalities in Kosovo with executive powers.
It is clear that the Western “empire of lies” does not care about objective circumstances: in Washington’s opinion, international legal principles, from the right to self-determination to the principle of territorial integrity, are valid only when it suits its selfish conjectural interests. In the case of Kosovo, they wanted to bring Serbia to its knees. Pumping Ukraine with weapons, forcing the regime in Kyiv to fight to the last Ukrainian standing and introducing sanctions against Russia, they want to exhaust, weaken and dismember Russia.
They will not succeed in one or the other!”
Source: https://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/529970/Kosovo-i-Donbas
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