NATO’s Intervention Changed Western-Russian Relations Forever

"Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form," Kissinger added.

But it was not just the failure of the Rambouillet talks that triggered the 78-day NATO intervention.

The action was caused also by grave violations of human rights in Kosovo and by the ongoing ethnic cleansing that displaced over a million Kosovo Albanians from the former Serbian province.

Serbs, on the other hand, highlight the civilian casualties on their side. The number of fatalities in the NATO campaign varies from several thousand, as Serbian official sources say, to 500 according to a report by Human Rights Watch.

The 20th anniversary of the bombing is a good opportunity to take a fresh look at events whose importance has been somehow overlooked, although they had a lasting impact on global affairs.

A just war - or just a war?

The legal aspect of the intervention has been much debated in the last two decades. Lacking a UN Security Council, UNSC, endorsement, the action was dubious in the eyes of those who consider the principle of sovereignty a cornerstone of international relations.

Legally doubtful, it was justified as the only way to end a humanitarian crisis. However, its humanitarian character did not end the controversy. Interpretations of the intervention revolve around two opposite set of arguments. For some, it was "a criminal act, an aggression against a sovereign country and its people"; for others, it was a just war launched to stop a humanitarian tragedy.

Looking for the legal underpinning, many in the West pointed out that the UNSC Resolution 1160 from March 1998 legally justified intervention.

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