Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic reproached the West for electoral morality in relation to Serbia during the NATO aggression in 1999 and in connection with the Russian special operation in Ukraine.
Serbian authorities on March 24 mark the tragic anniversary of the start of the NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
“When you talk about morality and principles, values, then I’ll ask you – who did Serbia attack in 1999 and you, 19 brave NATO countries, attacked Serbia,” Vučić answered on TV Pink when asked about the position EU that sanctions against the Russian Federation are not an economic, but a moral issue.
“Why don’t you, being so highly moral and principled, commit aggression against Russia? Why, being so highly moral and principled, don’t enter Ukraine to defend it. But morality is an important category in politics, but you can’t stick to it one day, and the other day it was not so important,” the Serbian president said.
According to him, Belgrade has to make a lot of efforts to prevent the West from imposing an image of itself as “Moscow’s hand in the Balkans” and to pursue an independent policy.
“In 2015, Russia helped us in the UN Security Council (vetoed the resolution on Srebrenica – ed.), Russia did not bomb us in 1999, and do not forget that in the UN Security Council, Russia, together with China, and even more resolutely defended the territorial integrity of Serbia. Can we – so small, insignificant in the political and economic sense compared to the United States, Germany, the EU – pursue an independent policy? We have survived so far, but whether we can continue is another question,” the Serbian leader emphasized.
In an address to citizens on March 2, Vucic said that the Serbian authorities supported 4 of the 13 points of the UN resolution condemning the actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine – those that do not imply sanctions and do not plan to alienate the property of Russian companies in the country. According to him, the crisis due to the hostilities in Ukraine is having a dramatic impact on Serbia, which has come under enormous foreign political pressure.
In 1999, an armed confrontation between Albanian separatists from the Kosovo Liberation Army and the army and police of Serbia led to the bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), at that time consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, by NATO forces. The military operation was undertaken without the approval of the UN Security Council and based on the assertion of Western countries that the authorities of the FRY carried out ethnic cleansing in the Kosovo autonomy and provoked a humanitarian catastrophe there. Air strikes by the North Atlantic Alliance lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999 and led to the death of more than 2.5 thousand people, including 87 children, and damage of 100 billion dollars.
Russia launched a military operation in Ukraine on February 24. President Vladimir Putin called its goal “the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kiev regime for eight years.” For this, according to him, it is planned to carry out “demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine”, to bring to justice all war criminals responsible for “bloody crimes against civilians” in Donbass.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces only strike at military infrastructure and Ukrainian troops. With the support of the Russian Armed Forces, the DPR and LPR groups are developing an offensive, but there is no talk of the occupation of Ukraine, the Russian president stressed.