Comment | Don't forget the Balkan wars, because at least Putin doesn't

On Monday presidential candidate Olli Rehnin (central) leader of the campaign's “citizens' network”. Anu Vehviläinen (middle) was Yle in the morning interview.

Of course, Vehviläinen also talked about the war in Ukraine.

“We have not seen war in Europe. In my time, at least, I haven't seen a war,” said Vehviläinen, who is also a former speaker of the parliament and a multiple-time minister.

Vehviläinen was born in 1963. In his lifetime, Europe has seen three devastating wars: the Croatian War of 1991–95, the Bosnian War of 1992–95, and the Kosovo War of 1998–99. They are called the breakup wars of Yugoslavia or the Balkan wars.

I understand Vehviläinen's slip, because it is common in Finland today. Russia's war of aggression has been a shock in Finland. Its scale is so huge that it seems to erase everything else from the mind.

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While basking on the beaches of Croatia, it might not occur to you that 30 years ago there was a war in the country.

But that's exactly why the Balkan wars should be remembered. Russia should not be allowed to lose its sense of history.

The wars lasted a whole decade from 1991 to 2001, if you count from the first outbreaks to the peace agreements. Well over a hundred thousand people were killed, civilians were slaughtered, and the first concentration camps were built in Europe since the Second World War.

In the 1990s, the Balkans were talked about as an inconsolable, endless nest of problems with no solution. Now, when you're basking on the beaches of Croatia, you don't necessarily remember that 30 years ago the country was still at war.

Balkan the wars should also be remembered because they are an inescapable block for understanding Russia.

It's possible that Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia precisely because of the Kosovo war. In Putin's worldview, the Kosovo war is a major reason for the demonization of NATO.

The final solution to the Balkan wars came in 1998. Serbia's western province, Kosovo, with an Albanian majority, sought independence. Serbia didn't let go. Russia supported Serbia, whose population is Orthodox, in the conflict.

At the beginning of 1999, war crimes were revealed in Kosovo. Serb forces carried out ethnic cleansing, perhaps genocide. The West tried to negotiate with Serbia and Russia. No solution was reached.

In March, NATO began bombing Serbia. The situation was messy: The bombings were carried out in the name of NATO but without UN authorization. There was talk of peace enforcement.

In May, the president Martti Ahtisaari was invited to lead the negotiations. Finally, after 78 days of bombing, the president of Serbia Slobodan Milošević relented and withdrew his troops from Kosovo.

The bombings left Russia with a deep trauma. Or not so much the bombings, but the fact that Russia realized that it does not have the right to veto world events.

Russia was at a low ebb.

The 1990s, which began with the greatest expectations, had led Russia to robbery capitalism and the collapse of the ruble. Citizens lost their savings and trust in democracy. It is difficult to say whether a larger chaos raged in the spring of 1999 Boris Yeltsin inside or outside the head.

And then came Kosovo.

The prime minister has become famous Yevgeny Primakov u translation. On March 24, Primakov was on his way to Washington for negotiations when he heard that the bombing was about to begin. Primakov ordered the plane to turn back to Moscow.

A U-turn took place in the Russian elites. The humiliation had to stop. A strong leader was needed who would bring the oligarchs under control and put a fist to the table with the West.

In August, Vladimir Putin was appointed prime minister. He was not a politician but the director of the security service FSB.

Putin keeps coming back to the Kosovo issue. Kosovo has given him endless reasons to gloat over the suffering of civilians or alternatively to defend himself by saying that you started it in Kosovo.

Putin is a lawyer by training. The Kosovo conflict was ugly and messy, and it's easy to find justifications. The bombings did not have UN approval, and what mandate did NATO actually have for them?

It wasn't about any surgical bombings. According to research by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch, the NATO bombings killed around 500 civilians in Serbia.

However, Russia was not interested in the lives of civilians, but in its own prestige. It wanted to reserve the right to decide the fate of the Balkan countries, even if the Kosovar Albanians paid for it with their lives.

Putin continues the same line. Already in 2013–14, during the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv, he claimed that Kosovo was the first “color revolution”. Putin also talked about Kosovo in his long speech, in which he justified the attack on Ukraine with the threat of NATO.

When Russia in the summer of 2022 “recognized” the occupied Donbas regions from Ukraine, Putin claimed that Kosovo's declaration of independence was a precursor to this very thing.

Balkan the wars should also be remembered because Kosovans fought for their right to decide their own affairs.

Kosovo finally declared independence in 2008. Serbia still considers it a province, and so does Russia.

Finland has recognized Kosovo. In honor of that, you can listen to the national anthem of Kosovo, or actually the anthem. In order to minimize ethnic conflicts, no words were written in the national anthem.

The anthem is called Europe.