Ethnic Russians in Ukraine, take a note. Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, you too.


There are two major points contained within the Charter of the UN: territorial integrity of sovereign states, and people's self-determination. You can't have both, it's either former or the latter. Problem with the West's approach to Yugoslavian crisis was that it was dishonest and lacked basic consistency. West was constantly jumping from one point to another and back, twisting or overriding international laws and even their own previously established principles. You can't destroy one multinational country under the pretext that every constitutive nation has rights to choose its own path, and in the same time claim that Bosnia, another multinational regional country, must stay united at all costs and use sanctions and military power to keep Bosnian Serbs and Croats -also two constitutive nations- within its borders. Or to tell that all former Yugoslavian republics should keep their borders and to encourage some to crush secessionists (like Croatia was allowed to destroy Serbian rebels, or Macedonia Albanian rebels) and then, only several years later, to embrace rebellion of Albanian ethnic minority in Serbian province of Kosovo and support their secession.

This, my friend, is called politics of double standards - notorious Western specialty! It's not possible to achieve fair, long lasting peace like that, by giving everything to one side while taking everything away from another. Reality is black and white only in dumb Hollywood movies.