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Our Russian Brothers
// Moscow Did What It Could for Belgrade
Serbia made its wager long before the UN Security Council reviewed the Ahtisaari plan for Kosovo. Having distanced itself from the process of negotiations and turned down an opportunity to at least attempt to improve the proffered solution, Belgrade unambiguously staked it all on Russia's veto.
The Serbian prime minister has recently been calling insistently on Moscow to pronounce a historic "no" on the plan, and even the metropolitan of the Serbian Orthodox Church has seconded him. The meaning behind these appeals boils down to the following: you, our Russian brothers, please just bang your fist on the table, and we will never forget what you have done for us.
This has been a recurring theme in relations between Moscow and Belgrade. In the first half of the 1990s, Slobodan Milosevic asked Russia to defend him from punishment by the West for his misdeeds in Bosnia. And in response, the Russian president's special representative, Vitaly Churkin, hastened to the Balkans and saved Belgrade from NATO bombardment. In the end, Mr. Milosevic signed the Dayton Peace Accord on Bosnia, which was dictated to him by the special representative of another president, the American Richard Holbrook.
In the fall of 1998, Moscow again saved Serbia from blows from NATO, this time on account of Kosovo. In return, Mr. Milosevic went behind Russia's back to sign two separate agreements with NATO, which Belgrade later violated, giving NATO a pretext to launch a bombing campaign over Serbia in March 1999.
And until recently, the new authorities in Belgrade have not been particularly generous to Russia, particularly in shutting Russian capital out of Serbian privatization, and they softened their stance only about a year and a half ago. That, coincidentally, was the same time that negotiations on the status of Kosovo began.
The negative for Russia in Serbia's current rigid insistence on a Russian veto lies not only in the likely confrontation with the West towards which Belgrade is shoving Moscow. The Serbian media under the control of Vojislav Kostunica's government has been assuring Serbs for months that the question of a Russian veto in the UN Security Council is practically settled, that Russia will not allow the UN to sever Kosovo, and that the province will always remain Serbian.
This propaganda campaign is deliberately circumventing the reality, which is that in essence Kosovo has long been lost to Serbia. The issue now is not how to keep it under Belgrade's authority, but how to find a solution to will avoid destabilization and that will allow both the international community and Serbia to save face.
The solution is not likely to fully appeal to the Serbs. And in their eyes, the main guilty party when it is adopted will be Russia. Because that same Mr. Kostunica will undoubtedly tell his fellow citizens: we pinned our hopes on Moscow, and it…
Russia did not fulfill Serbia's request at the most recent Security Council meeting. It did not use its veto power – there simply was no need to do so. Moscow managed to have the resolution on Kosovo put off for an indefinite period of time, and that is the most that it could do. The Serbian vision would have come at too high a price.
Gennady Sysoyev
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 05, 2007
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