Vladimir Putin has decided to return to the breakup of Yugoslavia. The Russian president said the decisions that split Serbs across several states were not in line with international law, accused the West of breaking its promise not to expand NATO, and said Ukraine will lose its western territories.

„I will not offer assessments now, because it is a complex process, but the decisions to divide the Serbian people into different national states were taken in a manner that was in no way consistent with the principles the UN was founded on. They simply let the genie out of the bottle”, Putin said.

When concern for the Balkans comes from Moscow

The thesis is familiar and has its own life cycle. Every time Russia needs to justify its own territorial behaviour, the breakup of Yugoslavia is put into service as an argument - not as Balkan history, but as a legal precedent needed for something else. This time the argument sits in the same sentence as Ukraine, which gives away its purpose.

And here is the part rarely spoken aloud when Moscow talks about Serbs. If the border decisions in this region were taken wrongly, that is something for the people who live here to argue about, in the countries that came out of it. It is not currency for somebody else to pay for their own war two thousand kilometres from the Balkans. Whoever plays this card, plays it for themselves.

The NATO promise and the genie nobody put back

The Russian president recalled that, in the time of Mikhail Gorbachev, Russia was promised NATO would not expand.

„And then came one enlargement after another. Despite our numerous protests and everything else, they did not care in the slightest about their promises or about the security interests of the Russian Federation. They kept expanding and eventually reached Ukraine”, Putin said.

He also recalled that the Ukrainian president at the time advocated joining the European Union but opposed NATO membership. „What did they do? They carried out a coup”, he concluded.

Here this is not an abstract debate

Macedonia joined NATO in 2020, after nearly three decades of waiting and at a price everyone knows. When Putin counts enlargement as a series of broken promises, we are in that series too - not as a party that decided anything, but as one more number in somebody else's list. A familiar position for this region.

Putin also said Ukraine will lose its western territories, which Stalin gifted to Kyiv. „Russia was the sole guarantor of Ukraine's territorial integrity, but Kyiv declared Moscow an enemy”, the Russian president said.

That sentence is worth reading twice. A state holding parts of another state by force describes itself as the guarantor of that state's integrity. In the Balkans that sentence has a long biography, and not one edition of it ended well for those who were „guaranteed”.