It has been 15 years since an agreement was signed in the not-famous American town of Dayton, which put an end to one of the phases of the Balkan crisis. It was called "On a Ceasefire, Separation of Warring Parties and Separation of Territories" and is officially considered the document that put an end to the 1992-1995 civil war in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But in Europe, this anniversary was not particularly noticed - perhaps because Dayton is no longer very important for the current structure of the continent, since it has played its role.
The real meaning of Dayton, as it is becoming more and more obvious today, was not at all the establishment of peace in the Balkans, but the transfer of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe under the control of the United States and NATO. And after the Dayton Agreement, no peace followed, but NATO's direct military aggression against Serbia, the separation of Kosovo from this country and the establishment of a quasi-sovereign bandit state on Kosovo territory. And then - the appearance in the Balkans of two American military bases at once - in Kosovo and Macedonia, that is, where they could not have appeared under any circumstances during the times of Yugoslavia.
Before the collapse of the allied Yugoslavia, which began in the 90s, this country was one of the most economically developed states in Europe, rivaling the FRG and France. With a population of 24 million people, the SFRY had a developed ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, powerful agriculture, and had huge reserves of chromium, bauxite, copper, lead, zinc, antimony, and mercury. Dozens of the largest ports on the Adriatic allowed Yugoslavia to trade with the whole world, and its armed forces were the fourth most powerful in Europe - after the USSR, France and Great Britain.
After a decade and a half since the signing of the Dayton Accords, many understand that the then desire of the West and NATO to participate in the defeat of Yugoslavia was their desire to destroy the entire post-war world order. A world in which order was largely determined by the balance of power between East and West, the authority of the UN, the influence of the Soviet Union and the group of socialist countries, whose leader was the USSR. The collapse of the USSR, which began with Gorbachev's perestroika, led to the collapse of Yugoslavia as well, becoming a major step towards a global world reconstruction in which the United States would play a dominant role.
Yugoslavia, in whose republics in the early 90s nationalist forces sharply and simultaneously became more active, came up to the role of a catalyst for these processes in the best possible way. Despite all its economic and military power, it consisted of national entities that could be opposed to each other and dismembered. At the same time, the SFRY was the only truly serious military ally of the USSR and Russia, it was the only country in Europe that did not obey the dictates of the United States and NATO. Therefore, its destruction by the joint efforts of NATO countries would clearly show all countries how dangerous it is to oppose the will of the North Atlantic bloc.
Then, in Yugoslavia, the West first tested the method of accelerated collapse of multinational sovereign states. One of its main tools was the accelerated recognition of individual subjects of the still living and existing federation as independent countries. So, for example, Germany did, unilaterally recognizing the independence of Croatia, when it was still formally part of the not dissolved SFRY. At the same time, in violation of international law, the FRG began to supply the territorial Croatian army with huge consignments of weapons, which it got from the arsenals of the People's Army of the GDR. It was these weapons (primarily tanks), made at Soviet military factories, that were used by the Croats in 1995 during two bloody offensive operations, when the 70,000-strong Croatian army defeated 15,000 militias of the Republic of Srpska Krajina. The operations that the Croats carried out in coordination with NATO were called Blisak and Oluja (Lightning and Tempest); they resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Serbs and the appearance of 500,000 Serb refugees in Yugoslavia.
Another way to accelerate the recognition of the subjects of the national federation as independent states was the active intervention of various "independent observers" and international and non-governmental organizations in the negotiations between the government of the SFRY and individual republics. The goal of this intervention looked quite noble: to achieve peace with the help of "independent" international mediators. In fact, Western mediators usually forced the Serbs to accept losing results - by imposing ready-made options developed by NATO on them, isolating Serbian delegations from other negotiating partners, by setting specially short time frames for negotiations. Meanwhile, the European media constantly kept repeating: everyone knows that the Serbs and Slobodan Milosevic are guilty of the war as the head of Yugoslavia, and therefore the failure of the negotiations will turn out to be punishment for Belgrade in the form of NATO bombings.
At the same time, the West quite cynically used Russia for its own purposes, forcing its leadership to twist the arms of the Yugoslavs, as did former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. Although the Russian battalions were part of the UN peacekeeping contingent in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they played almost no role there in protecting Serbs from the tyranny of Muslims and, in fact, sometimes helped NATO to suppress Serb resistance. And, as is now known, NATO "peacekeepers" in Bosnia and Herzegovina regularly opened fire on Serbian positions or pointed NATO aircraft at them, and also often concealed the crimes of the Bosnian military or accused the Serbs of them.
Today it should be admitted that during the years of the Balkan crisis, the Russian leadership did not at all understand its meaning and significance for changing the balance of power in the world in favor of the United States and NATO, for removing Moscow from the forefront of world politics. The inability and inability of the leaders of the Russian Federation to predict the development of the Balkan events, the unwillingness to use their real influence in the UN, the lack of independence of foreign policy and the desire to please “Western partners” today have led to a new configuration of Europe and the world, largely more hostile and inconvenient for our country.
Thus, in the 90s, with the connivance of Russia and even with its help, Yugoslavia was destroyed - the only ideologically and ideologically close military and economic ally to our country in Eastern Europe. Having withdrawn from participation in the solution of the Balkan crisis in 1995, Russia allowed its NATO opponents to play a major role in the Balkans. And at the same time destroy the former unity of the Slavic Orthodox states of Europe - Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Ukraine.
In the opinion of one of the leading Russian experts on the Balkans, Elena Guskova, in the 90s, Russian diplomacy “was distinguished by inconsistency, dishonesty, and negligence bordering on crime. Either we did not want to cooperate with S. Milosevic, tied our participation in the settlement of the Yugokrisis with the system of power in Yugoslavia, demanding the departure of the “National Bolsheviks” and their leader (in 1992), then we loved him to such an extent that all negotiations were conducted only with Belgrade … We put our signature under all Security Council resolutions on toughening sanctions, while we ourselves assured the Yugoslav leadership of painstaking efforts to lift them; we twisted Belgrade's hands, demanding constant concessions from it, and we ourselves did not fulfill the given promises; we threatened to prevent bombing of Serb positions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but did nothing to prevent this; we acted as guarantor of the Dayton Peace Accords, while we left Bosnia to the mercy of NATO representatives; we complained about the fascist methods of reprisals against the Serbian population in Croatia and awarded F. Tudjman (the leader of the Croats. - Approx. KM. RU) the Order of Marshal Zhukov. And, finally, we condemned the NATO aggression in Yugoslavia, and not only did not provide assistance ourselves, but also rudely forced it to accept the most difficult conditions of surrender by the hands of Chernomyrdin, voted for such Security Council resolutions, after which it would be difficult to keep Kosovo as part of Yugoslavia.”
Today, the Dayton Agreement, which resulted in the emergence of the autonomous Republic of Srpska within Bosnia and Herzegovina and its existence as a subject of international law, no longer suits NATO and the United States. Therefore, they call for a revision of the results of Dayton and the destruction of the last remnants of Serbian statehood in Bosnia. At the same time, the Republika Srpska is viewed as "obsolete" and unnecessary to Bosnia and Herzegovina state atavism with the prospect of further dissolving the Orthodox Serbs in the mass of the Bosnian Muslim population.
Over the past 15 years, our Western "partners" have already done a lot in the Balkans. Montenegro, which has become an independent state, has already been torn away from the former Federal Yugoslavia; the province of Kosovo, which has turned into an uncontrollable "black hole" of Europe, where hundreds of millions of euros of foreign aid are poured into it every year without a trace, will be torn away from Serbia. The next step is the breakaway from Serbia and the province of Vojvodina, where, according to NATO propaganda, ethnic Serbs allegedly oppress ethnic Hungarians (i.e., a repetition of the Kosovo scenario).
And for Russia, its foreign policy miscalculations in the Balkans turned into the fact that the general world order, where it played an important role, was violated. The previous supremacy of international law and the leading role of the UN in resolving international conflicts are also violated. Yes, Russia is a member of the UN Security Council, which is officially the main tribune for solving world problems, but after the partition of Yugoslavia, the UN is no longer considered the main factor in maintaining peace: it was actually replaced by the North Atlantic Alliance.
After the Balkan crisis, Russia is slowly but surely being ousted from all former spheres of its vital interests in Eastern Europe and even Central Asia: the security of the countries in these regions is already declared to be the concern of the United States and NATO. Moreover, the recently published US National Security Strategy even states that the US Armed Forces "are called upon to defend democracy on a global scale, including democratic processes in Russia." Naturally, with an active participation in solving our internal problems and normalizing relations between Moscow and the national republics of the Russian Federation through "international mediators", "international observers" and specialists in the protection of "human rights" in our country.
At the same time, it should be remembered that Zbigniew Brzezinski once planned the further collapse of the Russian Federation into three parts, which will be controlled by the United States, China and Europe. And former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright somehow dropped a very significant phrase that Siberia is too big to belong to only one country …
