When Moscow wants to explain why a military alliance is dangerous, it does not reach for theory. It reaches for 1999. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister, Andrei Rudenko, said that voices in the West are growing louder in favour of creating an Asian version of NATO - and cited bombed Yugoslavia as the main proof of what such blocs bring.

In his words, the call for a new structure in the Indo-Pacific, built on the model of the North Atlantic alliance, is getting stronger in the United States and in Europe. The logic of such a bloc, he argues, has always been the same: declare a common threat, assemble a military coalition around it, increase foreign military presence, and an arms race among the neighbours follows.

Then comes the part that sounds different in the Balkans than it does in Tokyo or Canberra. Rudenko recalled the 78 days of bombing of Yugoslavia without UN Security Council approval, then added Iraq and Libya. Three examples, one point - international order holds until it inconveniences whoever has the planes.

Should it be taken at face value? Hardly. This is Moscow using somebody else's pain as an argument in its own quarrel with the West, at the very moment it is waging a war in Ukraine that is legitimately thrown back in its face. When one power points at another power's breach of international law, that is diplomacy, not conscience.

But the fact remains a fact - 1999 really did happen without a Security Council resolution, and nobody since has offered a better explanation than „we had to”. That is precisely why Yugoslavia is to this day the handiest argument in other people's hands: it does not need to be invented, only mentioned.

Rudenko warned that dividing the world into blocs raises the risk of a dispute over policy or territory escalating into armed conflict, and named Ukraine as the latest country pulled into a contest between great powers - at a high human cost.

So whatever you conclude about who is lecturing whom, one thing is beyond dispute: 27 years on, our region is still the most quoted footnote in other people's geopolitical arguments. The Balkans settle nothing in the Indo-Pacific, yet they keep turning up in the statements. At what point does that stop being a compliment and start being a warning?