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Will Kyiv Suffer the Same Fate as Sarajevo During the Balkan Wars?
Putin has the same ultimate goal that Milosevic had in the 1990s
As the war in Ukraine continues to rage on, Russian troops have reportedly encircled the capital city of Kyiv. The indiscriminate bombing of the city in preparation for the ground assault has intensified over the past few days, with some civilians able to escape the city while many more dig in to fight. Some in the media have repeatedly stated that we have not seen the siege of a major European capital since World War II, when the Red Army captured Berlin in 1945.
Those commentators are off by roughly 50 years. The last time we saw a major European capital besieged was actually from April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996; the attackers were Bosnian Serbs from the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska (backed by Serbia), and the city was Sarajevo. That siege and the wider Balkan Wars of the 1990s were overlooked by most in the West then and forgotten by even more today, but they both hold important lessons for the war in Ukraine, particularly the battle for control of Kyiv.
To briefly sum up a truly complex event, after the fall of Communism in Yugoslavia in 1990, the country was broken up into six separate republics. Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic became the president of…
