I want to welcome everyone back to the Peking Yon show.

Thomas is back and we're going to start something new.

How you doing, Thomas?

I'm well.

Thank you.

Thanks for hosting me.

Of course.

We have gotten several requests for your take on the Balkans Wars, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, maybe even talk about Tito a little bit.

But yeah, where do you want to, where do you want to start this one?

Today, I anticipate this series naturally, kind of like organically, we'll go three episodes.

Obviously, it's your show, figuratively and literally.

We'll go as many as you wish on the topic.

What I'd like to do today, I want to focus on what the Croatians call the homeland war.

That was the war that approximately was caused by Croatia's Declaration of Independence,

Croatia and Macedonia essentially seceding from the Yugoslavian political structure in 1991 and the Serbian response to that and the

relationship of that to the situation then underway in the Soviet Union and what Berlin

where Helmut Cole was still consular at the time, what Berlin's response was how the world in turn reacted to that and what the relationship of that constellation of factors and those developments were on the situation in the Soviet Union, which was at that time very volatile.

In the second episode, I think we should get into the history of the independent state of Croatia.

I've got a particular interest in Croatia for a few reasons.

And they were, and especially for such a small country, they played an important and very

outsized role in the Axis Alliance.

Okay.

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