Analysis: How a 1999 NATO operation turned Russia against the West

T. Belman. The author is not sympathetic to Russia but I am.  See my addendum at the bottom.  Bottom line for me is, if the Arab world can make peace with Israel after all these years of war, US can make peace with Russia. I have no doubt that Trump and Putin can and will make this happen.

By Christian Snyder, Assistant Opinions Editor, PITT NEWS
SEPTEMBER 7, 2017

The name Boris Yeltsin should ring a bell, whether it brings to mind images of him leaping upon a tank during a coup in 1991 Moscow or standing drunk in his underpants in Washington, D.C. in 1995.

Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation, may be remembered for his drinking habits, but he was a massively important political figure throughout the 1990s. Understanding Yeltsin is just the first step toward realizing that a 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing of Yugoslavia served as the turning point in Russo-American relations and set the power of President Vladimir Putin against the United States.

But the story starts at the beginning of the decade. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and final resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991, serious change swept across what is now the Russian Federation. Gorbachev, heralded in the West for helping to end the Cold War, experienced declining popularity at home while receiving praise from world leaders.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for helping to end the Cold War, while at home his approval rating dropped to 21 percent. In the final years of the Soviet Union, economic crisis struck the country, and the ruble reached historic lows by 1988. The post-Soviet ruble opened official trading at a rate of 1.8 rubles per dollar in 1991, and by the end of Gorbachev’s last year in power the value had plummeted, trading at a rate above 160 rubles per dollar.

Gorbachev was overthrown during a coup in August 1991, and Boris Yeltsin was elected president, a man whose commitment to Western economic radicalism would eventually be his demise.

In contrast to Gorbachev, Yeltsin was viewed by Soviets and Americans alike as a fresh face for the Russian Federation — and throughout the 1990s, he was. In fact, even by 1997 Russo-American relations were productive and cordial. Regarding his 11th meeting with President Clinton, President Yeltsin said, “[America and Russia] have a vast area of congruent interests. Chief among these is the stability in the international situation. We want to do away the past mistrust and animosity … We will have enough of both patience and decisiveness.”

So what happened? What led Russia to pass a new national security concept just three years later in 2000 that affirmed Russia’s commitment to dealing with “domination by developed Western countries?”

The answer lies in Yugoslavia. After World War II, six nations joined the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or FRY — Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. But Serbia, then-home to the autonomous province of Kosovo, became a battlefield of Russo-American relations.

Kosovo is one of two geographic homelands for Albanians, an ethnic group native to Albania and Kosovo that speaks Albanian and is Sunni Muslim in majority. A census in 1981 revealed that 77 percent of the population in Kosovo was Albanian, while only 13 percent was Serbian.

But the autonomous region was in Serbia, where the official language was Serbian and the official religion was Eastern Orthodox Christianity — 85 percent of the population were Serbs, and only 1 percent were Albanian.

Through the 1990s, this ethnic disparity escalated to all-out war — the Kosovo War began in March 1998, and ended on June 11, 1999. A group of rebels banded together as the Kosovo Liberation Army — or KLA — to fight against Yugoslavia for discriminating against Kosovo Albanians.

But things turned ugly in January of 1999. In the small town of Racak, Serbian security forces killed 45 Kosovo Albanians, and most of the slain were women and children.

In response to the Racak massacre, NATO did something unprecedented. The coalition wanted to end the massacres of Kosovo Albanians, but were told by Russian and Chinese UN delegates that their nations would oppose any use of force. So, without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, NATO military forces launched a bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that lasted 78 days. Operation Allied Force — the official NATO code name for the attacks — resulted in the deaths of over 500 civilians.

An Alternate opinion expressed in the comments

First of all, the so called Racak massacre was a big fat lie to justify the illegal aggression on independent country. No kids or women were killed, like you claim, just terrorists who attacked and killed police the day before. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are war criminals who obliterated all rules of international order leading the way to September 11, Iraq and Afghanistan occupation, ISIS..,

The aggression on Serbia resulted with several thousands civilians killed, many women and children. This is the stain on the face of USA since Serbs were allies in WWI and WWII who saved 500 USA pilots during WWII from German nazis.

Russia was later ostracized by the Western world for its annexation of Crimea and actions in Syria, a journalist asked Putin if the decline of Russo-American relations was due to Crimea or Syria.

“You are mistaken,” Putin said. “Think about Yugoslavia. This is when it started.”

NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia represented a drastic use of military force that Putin saw as contrary to international law — which it probably was. And for people like Putin, who reminisce over the powerful Soviet Union that they grew up in, an attack on Serbia was an attack on a close ally.

So for the first few years of his presidency, during which he launched the nation into a new war in Chechnya, Putin focused on bringing dignity back to Russia. Even today, he’s still on this quest in places like Georgia, Chechnya and Crimea. Putin continues to reference Operation Allied Force when discussing international politics.

“Our Western partners, led by the United States of America, prefer not to be guided by international law … but by the rule of the gun,” he said in a 2014 speech defending his effort to annex Crimea. “They have come to believe … they can decide the destinies of the world. This happened in Yugoslavia; we remember 1999 very well.”

The wounds of 1999 still run deep, and Putin harnesses this Russian perception of American exceptionalism in order to play the victim card, turning his people against the West. In the same speech, Putin accused the West of lying to Russia, making decisions behind their backs and pursuing an “infamous policy of containment.”

Of course, this rhetoric works in a country where 88 percent of people get their news from primarily state-controlled television. Putin uses the media to convince his people of the West’s exceptionalism, but he doesn’t show the atrocities Russia commits to warrant political action like sanctions. This why his people don’t blame him for the declining price of the ruble or increasing food prices — they blame the Western world.

Understanding Putin’s vengeance against NATO —the United States included — for its bombing of Yugoslavia can provide a key lens into how Putin operates as a world leader. With him, things are personal — his quest to restore power to the Soviet Union is rooted in his feeling that the world turned against him and his people in 1999.

And as for solutions? There are few in sight. Even if you had the power to flip a switch and give the country the freedom of press, which has often served as the catalyst for revolutions, would you? Doing so could ignite a civil war and result in the deaths of millions — but the result might be a freer Eastern Europe.

If America truly is the nexus of democracy that the world perceives it to be, we must work on problems from their roots rather than attacking their victims. Bombing capital cities and starting proxy wars will get the world nowhere. Putin’s non-democratic expansion doesn’t follow the rules of political logic because much of it is rooted in a personal grudge — and understanding the cause of the grudge could prove vital in ending it.

Christian is the assistant opinions editor at The Pitt News. Write to Christian at cjs197@pitt.edu. 

The US killed any prospect of friendly relations with Russia

By Ted Belman

From the end of WWII to the unravelling of the USSR, the US and the USSR engaged in the Cold War.

When Pres Reagan went to West Berlin in 1987 he said in his epic speech: “Secretary General Gorbachev, if you seek peace–if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe–if you seek liberalization: come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” and allow Germany to reunite. A couple of years later, Secretary of State James Baker assured Gorbachev that NATO would expand “not one inch eastward”.

The destruction of the wall began in 1990 and was completed in November 1991. A month later, the USSR dissolved.

Boris Yeltsin, the first President of Russia spoke to the Joint Houses of the US Congress six months later and said “The idol of Communism, which spread everywhere social strife, animosity, and unparalleled brutality, which instilled fear in humanity, has collapsed. It has collapsed never to rise again. I am here to assure you, we will not let it rise again in our land. . . .”.  He went on to say “the people of Russia are offering their hand of friendship to the people of the US.“

Thus, the US had a choice to make. She could institute a new Marshall Plan to help rebuild Russia and to protect the fledgling democracy or she could punish the Russian people by abandoning them to their fate. She chose the latter.

This response was articulated 1992 by Under Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, on behalf of President HW Bush, in the Wolfowitz Doctrine, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine, which basically held, the US should never again allow any other country to challenge it and should watch out for Russia.

True to Baker’s assurance, NATO stayed put for 4 years. Then in 1996, NATO expanded eastward to include Poland, Czech and Hungary.  Such an expansion was hotly debated on both sides.

As Alex Markovsky wrote in Trump, NATO, and the Burden of the Past ,

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, NATO found itself without a mission. “Mission accomplished” is not good news for a military alliance — it needs enemies for self-preservation.

Hence, the concept of an alliance was quietly converted into a doctrine of collective security. The significance is that while alliances identify potential adversaries and serve clearly defined objectives, the doctrine of collective security carries much broader implications. It may oppose any aggressive conduct anywhere in the world that may be interpreted as a threat to the peaceful international order. In this spirit NATO, paraphrasing John Quincy Adams, has gone around the world “in search of monsters to destroy” — often pursuing not strategic but moral goals in an attempt to promote Western values.

But the most troublesome aspect of this conversion is that in a violation of the verbal agreement between Secretary of State James Baker and Russian Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.  After the fall of the Berlin Wall, NATO launched a massive expansion to the east, growing from 16 countries before the reunification of Germany to 28 today. This expansion can be seen from Moscow only as a strategy to encircle Russia and turn its neighbors into hostile countries. It provokes Russia’s paranoia and could lead to a direct confrontation with the United States reminiscent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

As George Kennan, American diplomat and author of the concepts of “Cold War” and “containment,” prophetically wrote in the New York Times on February 5, 1997:

“….. expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold war era…. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Clinton, who was an architect of the expansion, ignored George Kennan’s warning and subsequently created a destabilizing environment in Europe, which was further exacerbated by the Obama administration.  Idealism and affinity have led to the over-extension of American commitments and resulted in financial burdens that, according to Trump, America can no longer afford.

In May 1996, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia and served until he was replaced by Medvedev in 2008. He was reelected President in 2012 by a huge majority.

In 1999 NATO under Pres Clinton’s leadership, without UN authority, bombed Serbia into submission to enable the Kosovo to secede from Serbia. For centuries Serbia had been a client state of Russia so this was seen as an attack on Russia also.

Notwithstanding, the ill treatment of Russia by the US, Putin was the first to call Pres Bush after 9/11 and offered to help Bush in Afghanistan should the US invade it.

In Syria, Russia also showed a friendly face to the US and to Israel.  Not only did Putin not make a serious effort to dislodge the US from eastern Syria, he did not shoot down Israeli planes tasked with the job of attacking Iranian supply chains in Syria and forcing them to retreat.

The Syrian war will come to an end only when the US and Russia cooperate in finding a political and financial solution for the rebuilding of Syria.  This solution may involve the removal of Ass and the Iranians.