Putin’s Obsession With Kosovo Makes Little Sense

(Apologies for length but I think arguments relevant)

In his 850 page biography of Vladimir Putin, the former BBC correspondent Philip Short who reported from Russia and knows the country and its 21^st century political class well, keeps returning to Putin citing the intervention to end the death squads, ethnic cleansing, torture and murders of the Serb autocrat Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo as a justification for invading Ukraine and annexing part of its territory.

There are more entries in the index of Short’s fine book ‘Vladimir Putin. His Life and Times” about Kosovo than there are about Italy, Ireland or Canada.

Short’s book was published in 2022 so does not cover Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his failed military effort so far to incorporate Ukraine as a subordinate colony or region controlled and subservient to Moscow.

He writes that when Putin invaded Georgia in 2008 and annexed two Georgian regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Dimitri Medvedev, Putin’s sidekick who was temporarily President of Russia cited as “a precedent the West’s recognition of Kosovo” earlier that year.

“Kosovo was a constant reference throughout the Georgian war and the settlement that followed,” Short argues.

For nearly a decade after 1990 and the end of communism, the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic tried to hang on to the left-over bits of Yugoslavia. First Slovenia, the Alpine region of the former Yugoslavia peeled off. Then Croatia, a mainly catholic region, strongly backed by Austria and Germany, rejected staying under Serb rule and an armed struggle for independence began.

The Yugoslav army was largely under Serb rule and Milosevic encouraged death squads to roam terrorising any communities that wanted to live under their own rule not subject to laws and edicts from Belgrade.

What became known as Yugoslavia emerged from the Balkan wars at the beginning of the 20^thcentury and then from the collapse of the Hapsburg empire after 1918.

In truth none of the 7 nations that emerged from what was baptized the “former Yugoslavia” after 1990 – Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia – were ever going to keep alive the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation.

It was as realistic as asking Catholic Ireland after the War of Independence 1919-1921 to accept being ruled from London and agree to subordinate status as part of the Britain that had oppressed Ireland for centuries.

The European Community which became the European Union in 1992 was unable to make Milosevic accept a future for Serbia based on the facts on the ground that Yugoslavia was over as a single state entity.

Instead he used the Serb army to try and terrorise the people of Sarajevo in Bosnia culminating in the genocidal mass murder one by one of 8,000 Europeans at Srebrenica in 1995.

A decaying Conservative government in Britain refused to intervene. Indeed senior government officials and a Tory minister went to work for Milosevic enriching themselves selling off Serb Telecom operations.

In 1993 I sat in the White House with one of the newly elected Bill Clinton’s top aides, a friend. I told him “Europe won’t lift a finger to stop Serb fascism and murder. The US will have to intervene.”

“Denis, this president will not send a single American soldier to the Balkans,” he said.

“Wait and see,” was my reply.

Intellectuals like Michael Ignatieff in London and Bernard Henri-Lévy in Paris developed what they called the doctrine of “The Right to Intervene” arguing that if human rights violations were so egregious then military intervention was justified.

Thus when Tony Blair became prime minister in 1997 he sent British forces to Sierra Leone to stop local warlords cutting off the arms of children in order to intimidate opponents. When the Indonesian autocrat Suharto was overthrown I was in the Foreign Office with Robin Cook when Royal Navy warship were diverted to Indonesia together with Australian soldiers to make clear to the Indonesian army discipline should be maintained, no units should run amok, and the military should obey civil authority.

Milosevic meanwhile had ordered an all-out assault on those arguing in Kosovo that their nation should also be free of Serb rule. Pacificists like the widely accepted leader of the people of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, to the young charismatic ex-students’ leader, Albin Kurti, and his Vetëvendosje (Independence) party to those who reacted to the sheer butchery of the Serb by taking up arms to attack Serb army units and death squads differed in tactics but like Ireland under British rule 80 years previously or Slovenia or Croatia after 1990 who used force to end Serb rule, the people of Kosovo were no longer willing to live under Serb dictatorship.

The Serb atrocities against elderly Kosovars, women and children in 1998-99 led to half the 2.1 million population of Kosovo fleeing from their homes to cross frontiers to safety. They fanned out seeking asylum across Europe. Britain took its share. In the south Yorkshire town of Rotherham I represented in the House of Commons a few dozen Kosovars were found housing.

They sat miserably in jeans and leather jackets smoking in the town centre. Straight away far right political forces, including the anti-semitic, racist British National Party, began agitating against the presence of these temporary asylum seekers. The tensions in the Balkans caused by Milosevic and his young press officer, Aleksandar Vucic, today’s president of Serbia and close to Putin, had now become domestic politics in Britain and other EU countries as well as in North America where US media reported in detail the crisis in Kosovo caused by the Serb insistence that Kosovars should remain under their oppressive rule.

The discovery of mass graves by UN inspectors of Kosovars murdered by Serbs forced Tony Blair to put together a coalition of governments in the US, France, Germany and Italy prepared to use military force to stop the Serb killers and let refugees return home.

The European leaders and the US did not go and seek UN approval as Russia made clear it would veto a UN-stamped armed intervention to end the Seb butchery and if not Russia, China, would also block the democracies in favour of Milosevic.

For the first time in a decade the Serb army and its linked death squads met professional military force. Serb army communications centres in Belgrade and elsewhere were attacked by superior airpower.

I watched as German troops prepared to move across the border from North Macedonia into Kosovo. A Serb army unit stood ready to attack them. As the German soldiers snaked forward a young officer without a weapon in his hand, led his men to confront the heavily armed Serbs. A Serb soldier lifted his AK47 as if to shoot the German officer who bravely went up to him , pushed down the Serb rifle and the Serbs parted to let the forces of Euroatlantic democracy bring to an end the Serb years of killing and expulsions in Kosovo.

I experienced the reaction in Moscow to the end of Serb colonial occupation of Kosovo. I led a delegation of MPs there in June 1999 for talks with Russian counterparts. Over dinner at the British embassy with Russian policy thinkers they laid into the Brits about the intervention to stop the Milosevic mass murders and expulsion of Kosovars in their own country and communities. I noted in my diary the Russian view : “It was aggression, it was done without UN sanction, it was disproportionate, the attack on the Chinese embassy was deliberate,” the Russians told the British MPs.

The next day we were in the Duma where we met the International Affairs Committee and Defence Committee. We were told the attack on Belgrade military communication infrastructure “ was a crime and an aggression. The Kosovars should be disarmed so once again their communities would be at the mercy of Serb killers.

I noted at the time: “It was as if Srebrenica had never happened. But I guess most Russians think Katyn was a western lie.”

As a trained Marxist, Putin surely is aware of Stalin’s definition of a nation written in his only excursion into theoretical Marxist-Leninism. A nation wrote Stalin is a “historically evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture.”

All the nations of the West Balkans fail to meet fully those criteria including Serbia. Kosovo had its own language, Albanian. It had a syncretic version of Islam under which Kosovars drink alcohol with gusto in contrast to more severe versions of Islam which bans alcohol.

Kosovo also had a strong catholic community notably represented by the Kosovar nun, Saint Mother Theresa, who spent her life as a missionary with the poor in Calcutta. Some of the major churches of Serb orthodox Christianity were in Kosovo like Church of Ireland protestant churches in majority Catholic Ireland. It had heroes of a history dating back to the early Middle Ages.

Like Portugal, Ireland or Latvia it was not a major European nation and as Christopher Hitchens wrote: “There was probably no cause with fewer friends than that of Kosovar Albanians…Their past was not understood or examined, their kinship with the strange and inward nation of Albania seemed tribal and bizarre.”

In the Middle Ages and under the long era of Ottoman rule Kosovo never had an entirely separate existence. But the same is true of Serbia. The later 19^th century gave birth to the concept of nationhood covering all of Europe enshrined in the US president Woodrow Wilson’s doctrine of “self-determination” after the first world war. Norway was part of Sweden until the early 20^th century. The precise borders of Poland or Hungary have changed. States like Czechslovakia or Hungary put together in the rush to draw frontiers after the First World War and which became UN members after 1945 simply crumpled after 1990 as it became clear, to paraphrase Willy Brandt, that that which did not belong together had to come apart.

Kosovo is a clear geographical entity. It is surrounded by mountains that cut if off from Albania and North Macedonia and hills that separate Kosovo from the main trade routes that run from Belgrade or Greece and Bulgaria.

Kosovo has its own internal laws – the Kanun – the Code of Lek Dukagjini. Serbia emerged as a separate nation at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the same year as the Kosovar League of Prizen was founded to win independence for a Kosovar nation. In the Balkan wars of 1912-13 the Catholic Archbishop of Skopje sent a report to the Vatican about the Kosovar city of Prizren. “The city seems like the kingdom of death. The Serbs knock on the doors of (Kosovar) Albanian houses, take away the men and shoot them immediately… as for plunder, looting and rape, all that goes without saying, henceforth the order of the day is everything is permitted against the Albanian Kosovars.”

This history was as well known to every Kosovar as the British murder in cold blood of the 8 Irish national leaders who signed Ireland’s proclamation of the Irish independence in 1916 or the rampages and killings of the British “Black and Tan” squads in the later Irish war of independence are part of history that every Irish child grows up with.

Ukrainian self-identity also based on language, a clear sense of identity and its own orthodox church was also forged thanks in part to Stalin’s Russian chauvinist Holodomor policy of using famine to mass starvation to exterminate Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s.

So Putin’s comparison of Ukraine with Kosovo as a nation that should accept its place as part of Russia as Serbs claim Kosovo is part of Serbia falls apart.

Nevertheless Putin, according to Philip Short, returns like a dog to a bone as he repeats the li(n)e that Ukraine is the same as Kosovo which like other West Balkan small nation sought freedom to exist free of Serb rule once Milosevic was overthrown.

As Philip Short notes Putin could not let go of the Kosovo comparison. Short writes: Putin “complained that the West urged recognition of the independence of Kosovo, which was legally a part of Serbia, threatening the inviolability of Europe’s post-war frontiers”. Yet Belgrade’s rule over the component nations of the former Yugoslavia had been ended thanks to military uprisings. Kosovo has suffered the most since 1990 and idea it should return to Serb rule was absurd.

Short goes on “Putin had been arguing (in 2008) there was no difference between Kosovo and the two breakaway Georgian regions” – again a surreal proposition. South Ossetia and Abkahazia were fully Georgian. When Putin invaded his soldiers arrived with Russian passports already made out in the names of Georgian citizens living in the two region. I was given one by Georgian MPs at the Council of Europe where I was a UK delegate.

Putin even told the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, “You know we have to answer the West on Kosovo. We are very sorry , but you are going to be part of the answer.”

By then most G7 and EU nations had opened diplomatic relations with Kosovo. The pretence Kosovo was going to return to Serb rule evaporated. Greece on account of Turkey’s invasion and annexation of part of Cyprus in 1974; Spain where politicians were obsessed with the idea of Catalonia separating from Madrid and Romania and Slovakia which had age-old claims on small Romanian and Slovakian communities in Hungary that Bucharest and Bratislava believed should be transferred from Hungarian rule meant to these 4 prickly nationalist EU member states refusing diplomatic recognition of Kosovo as it would only cause domestic political problems.

When Putin occupied and annexed the Ukrainian Crimea region in 2014 he again cited Kosovo a pretext. Russia had wrested Crimea from Ottoman rule in the 18^th century. It became famous as a holiday resort for elite Russians in Tsarist and Soviet times. In 1954, the Kremlin formally passed a law making the oblast (region) of Crimea part of Ukraine which was an independent member of the United Nations even if under the Kremlin’s imperial rule.

So by both Russian constitutional law and international law Crimea was part of Ukraine up to and after 1990. Putin had been humiliated politically by the people of Ukraine during the Orange revolution in 2005, and again in 2009 when mass demonstrations showed Ukraine did not want to live under Putin’s oppressive rule.

Again in 2014, the Ukrainians mobilised in the so-called EuroMaidan uprising after the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, refused to sign a Ukraine-EU agreement and instead proposed that Ukraine should join Putin’s newly designed Eurasian Economic Union. EU flags flew everywhere as it became clear Ukrainians saw themselves as European not colonial subjects of Putin. They looked west while Putin wanted them to look east. Protests lasted from November 2013 to February 2014 when the pro-Putin president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, went into exile in Russia as voters vented their fury on his corruption and crawling to Putin.

Putin’s response was to annex Crimea. Once again he claimed Russia was only copying what happened in Kosovo. “The Crimean authorities followed the well-known Kosovo precedent when they agreed to the unilateral separation of Kosovo from Serbia exactly what Crimea is doing now.”

The Russian leader’s logic was hard to follow. Kosovo met Stalin’s definition of a nation – language, history, culture, borders – which Crimea a region of Ukraine accepted as such by Russia did not. Philip Short writes “Russia’s annexation of Crimea was payback for Kosovo, “the place where it all started.” Putin’s Kosovo pathology revealed a remarkable ignorance about West Balkan history and politics. The Belgrade Serb authorities tried to keep control of Bosnia or Croatia or even Slovenia and met with resistance. Many in Brussels, European capitals or Washington might have hoped Tito’s post-1945 Yugoslavia would hold together but it was not to be. Kosovo was one of seven small new nations to emerge from the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Putin’s invasions and dismemberment of Georgia in 2008 and then Ukraine 2014 were classic dominant power politics. Endlessly quoting Kosovo made Putin look ignorant at least to anyone who knew recent West Balkan history.

The 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine ordered by Putin belongs to the worst episodes of the last years of European history more like the German nationalist invasion of Poland in 1939 than any of the quarrels in the Balkans arising from the disappearance of Ottoman and Hapsburg rule.

Putin has opened a new chapter in European history. How it will end remains to be written. Kosovo is sui generis. Its quarrel with Serbia is for Belgrade and Prishtina to resolve. Putin’s efforts to use the dispute to justify his attempts to restore the Kremlin’s imperial rule in Georgia and Ukraine, and perhaps if he is not checked other nations Moscow ruled between 1920 and 1990 are intellectual, ahistorical nonsense. They persuade no-one in East Europe nor in the Balkans and should be treated with contempt by writers and policy-makers in the democratic world.

Denis MacShane is author of “Why Kosovo Still Matters’ Haus Publishing 2011