All right, Alexander. Let's talk about the 25 years of the NATO bombing of Serbia, of Belgrade.

25 years. It seems like that's that bombing, 78 days under the Clinton White House.

Seems like that bombing is what set us on this, this course of where we are today.

I was one of the most important events of the post-Cold War period.

Now, the reason was two things.

Firstly, well, actually three things.

Firstly, if you actually examine the bombing war itself,

it should have given warning signs to the West

that their military resources were not actually as strong as they thought.

Because as a bombing war, purely in terms of its military effectiveness, it wasn't that

effective.

The Serbian military absorbed the blows. They didn't suffer significant losses. They were able even to shoot down some NATO aircraft. It should have given the warning signals. That was not picked up. So that's the first thing. The second was that in terms of the West, in terms of Western leaderships, the NATO bomb, the bombing war on Yugoslavia did two things. Firstly, because politically it was successful, because Milosevic backed down, not because he was under any

military pressure, but because he didn't want to be in conflict with the West and the Russians

were telling him to back down. That was Yeltsin's time, of course. Because he backed down, that strengthened the

Western belief that they could do anything. They could define the Security Council, as they did,

in launching that bombing war. They could break their own rules by having a NATO conduct an air offensive against another country, which had not attacked them.

Remember, NATO is supposed to be a defensive alliance, but in this bombing war, it acted in

an offensive way. It led to people like Tony Blair coming out and saying that sovereignty henceforth is limited.

The Vesphalian system is basically over.

From now on, the West has not just the rights, but the duty to interfere in other countries in order

to advance the cause of democracy.

Human rights, Yugoslavia, in that respect, gave a huge impetus to the whole Nicon movement

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