A deeply flawed attempt by the Quincy Institute's Director of Studies to draw a parallel between the West's intervention against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Its numerous errors of fact and omissions include the following:
https://twitter.com/RStatecraft/status/1496281149307502605
1. The ahistorical claim that NATO's Kosovo intervention was based on 'a new principle conjured up by the United States and its partners, R2P.' In fact R2P was only formulated in its aftermath, and its instigators included Sudan's Francis Deng and Algeria's Mohamed Sahnoun.
2. The suggestion that Bosnian Serbs were unjustly treated as 'pariahs' in Washington, and only later discredited themselves through the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
In fact, Serbian paramilitaries were committing atrocities in Bosnia as early as April 1992. By August 1992, @edvulliamy had drawn the attention of the world to the horrific condition of emaciated inmates in the notorious Omarska concentration camp.
3. The failure to understand that the Kosovo war was a response not merely to atrocities in early 1999, but to a sustained pattern of state-sponsored ethnic repression by the Milosevic stretching over a decade.
4. The unsubstantiated claim that 'ethnic Russians in Ukraine mostly support Moscow.' If this were true, Ukraine would never have survived Putin's 2014 Novorossiya Project, his first attempt to carve out an ethnic Russian state from southeast Ukraine.
5. The simplistic claim that the Ukrainian state tramples on the linguistic and cultural rights of Russians, which ignores the complexities of a bilingual society and the diversity of European norms on state language policy.
It also ignores the fact that numerous Russian intellectuals, journalists and opposition politicians have chosen to flee from Putin's Russia to Ukraine, where they can participate in Russian-speaking debate in a free society.
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