The sky of the Slavs

Let's start with history.

May-June 1999.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (which at that time included only Serbia and Montenegro) is being brutally bombed by NATO.

Not only soldiers of the Yugoslav army are dying, but also civilians: the elderly, women, children.

Bombs containing depleted uranium rain down deadly on Kosovo and the Bay of Kotor.

Every day, Western aviation makes raids on peaceful cities and shoots up bridges, factories, even passenger trains.

Finally, Slobodan Milosevic capitulates to the West.

And here, when NATO countries are preparing to take the key cities of Kosovo, Russian paratroopers make a legendary attack on Pristina.

About how a battalion of peacekeepers from Bosnia in a day passed half of the Balkan Peninsula and occupied the Slatina airport, cleared of Albanian terrorists by Yunus-Bek Yevkurov’s special forces, tells one of the best Russian films of recent years, “The Balkan Frontier” - if anyone has not watched, I highly advise.

But beyond the scope of this picture were the dramatic events that unfolded after the commander of the British tankers, General Jackson, who received the order to “destroy the Russians”, answered the commander of NATO forces in Europe, the American Wesley Clark: “Sir, I do not intend to start a third world war for you ".

But after a brilliant “cavalry attack” on the airfield, the Russian General Staff planned to transfer at least two airborne regiments and heavy armored vehicles to Kosovo so that the Russian presence in the region was not limited to a battalion of peacekeepers, surrounded on all sides by superior NATO forces.

Military transport aircraft of the Russian Air Force were already warming up their engines, but at the last moment the operation had to be canceled: Hungary and Bulgaria, the newly minted members of the North Atlantic Alliance, closed their airspace to our aviation.

In the end, the number of our peacekeepers was tripled, but, scattered across the areas of responsibility of the British, Americans and French, they could not effectively protect the Kosovo Serbs from Albanian bandits and terrorists.

So the Hungarians and Bulgarians helped the West to defeat the remnants of the former Yugoslavia.

...It's been 23 years.

On June 5, three Balkan countries - Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Montenegro - did not provide diplomatic permission for the flight of the plane on which Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was supposed to fly to Belgrade, and closed the sky for him.

Formally, this decision was made in accordance with the EU sanctions against Russia - in Bulgaria, Lavrov is on the restriction list.

But neither North Macedonia nor Montenegro is an EU member state: they are just waiting in the lobby for their membership application to be considered in Brussels, and the timeframe for that review is being pushed further and further into the future.

But both of these Balkan countries are members of NATO - and hardly anyone can doubt that the order to close the sky for the plane of the main Russian diplomat was given at the headquarters of this particular organization.

It is especially shameful that Montenegro was included in this list of loyal vassals of the West.

In 1999, let me remind you, she was part of the FRY, and, therefore, Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo risked their lives for her.

The next day, Russian Ambassador to Serbia Alexander Botan-Kharchenko officially informed Serbian President Alexander Vučić about the absence of conditions for Sergey Lavrov's visit, providing the refusals of the governments of Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Montenegro to let the Russian minister's Il-96 through.

The position of the neighbors in the Balkans put Vučić in an uncomfortable position.

After all, the meeting of the “chairman” (as the head of state is called in Serbian) of Serbia and the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry was announced in advance and was supposed to once again confirm the strong, time-tested ties between Moscow and Belgrade.

But this is exactly what the West is not going to allow Serbia to do: it needs it, like a bull on a string, to obediently go where it is led by curators from the European Commission and the State Department.

And the demarche of Sofia, Skopje and Podgorica, in fact, limits the sovereignty of Belgrade.

“It happened, in general,

Which, of course, looks like a direct insult to the Serbian president.

“I'm not surprised,” Vucic said in an interview with RTS.

“I said a few days ago that I was expecting complications.

Day after day, we have been monitoring the situation and attempts to change the route of an increasing number of countries that have banned the overflight of the Russian minister's plane.

Of course, I must express my dissatisfaction with the attempt to forbid the negotiations."

According to the president of the country, he was under enormous pressure from the West.

A large number of foreign media journalists came to Serbia to photograph Lavrov and Vučić and portray the visit of the Russian minister in an entirely negative light.

“I haven’t seen such hysteria and organized attack on such a small country like Serbia for a long time,” Vučić added.

“They can’t do anything to Russia, so they decided to mock little Serbia.”

At the same time, Vučić stressed that although Serbia refuses to become "part of the pack" attacking Russia, it condemns the "invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine."

Of course, you won’t envy Vucic: as the influential Serbian newspaper Vecherniye Novosti writes, it’s very “hard to be an ally of a distant country, being surrounded by countries that are part of a bloc hostile to it.”

Yes, and the government is headed by Ana Brnabic, oriented (in every sense) towards the globalist-liberal West, who is skeptical about an alliance with Russia.

According to Brnabic, the main supporter of Serbia's European vector of movement, Lavrov's visit puts Serbia in an "extremely difficult situation."

But for most of the Serbian leadership, the boorish behavior of their neighbors (and after all, the Serbs lived in the same state with the Macedonians and Montenegrins not so long ago!) did not find understanding.

Serbian Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin said that he “deeply regrets the disruption of the visit of Serbia’s great and trusted friend, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov.

A world in which diplomats cannot seek peace is a world in which there is no peace.

Those who prevented the arrival of Sergei Lavrov do not want peace, they dream of defeating Russia.

Serbia is proud that it does not participate in the anti-Russian hysteria, and the countries that participate in it still have time to be ashamed.”

Alexander Vulin has traditionally been the main supporter of partnership with Moscow in the Vučić government, so his position was not a particular surprise.

But this time, Serbian Defense Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic also supported him.

He stated that Serbia retains the right to determine its own path, to make independent decisions that meet the exclusive interests of its people.

Propaganda attacks on Serbia and President Vučić are carried out with the same intensity both from the opposition inside the country and from other countries in the region, and this is outrageous.

“Why this is happening and why so much hysteria is directed against Serbia, no one even asks - it’s too obvious,” the minister wrote.

What is there to ask?

It is already clear that Washington and Brussels would like to quarrel - preferably forever - between Moscow and Belgrade.

But Serbia is the only one of the countries of the former Yugoslavia that is not directly controlled by the US embassy and the EU representation.

Therefore, to put pressure on its leadership, the West has to use other levers.

It is no coincidence that on June 6, when Vucic met with the Russian ambassador, a small but noisy protest rally organized by the organization “Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Serbs together against the war” took place under the walls of his residence.

The day before, a call for “peace lovers” to come and tell Vučić and Botan-Kharchenko “what they think about them, as well as about the shameful attempt of the Serbian authorities to host the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the aggressor state” was circulated on social networks.

It was either seven or eight people who came to the residence, including Peter Nikitin, who had escaped from Moscow (a comical character, a regular at all anti-Russian gatherings, who prefers to call himself Peter, almost after Mayakovsky: “He was a fitter Vanya, but in the spirit of Parisians awarded himself the title of “electrical engineer Jean”) and the Montenegrin lawyer Cedomir Stojkovic, who honestly earns money from USAID.

There were many times more police officers guarding these "peace fighters" - because passers-by could accidentally hit them on the neck.

The Serbian media bluntly write that behind the "pro-Ukrainian organizations in Serbia" are "separate Western embassies and NATO structures."

Of course, in the Western press you will not read that even ten people did not come to the “protest rally”, nor that those who came received generous grants from their curators in the US and EU embassies.

The only Serbian "political scientist" whom AP decided to ask about Sergey Lavrov's canceled visit to Belgrade is the former BBC correspondent in Serbia, Slobodan Stupar, known in the journalistic community for his extreme groveling towards the West and contempt for Serbian history and culture.

It is not surprising that such a character uttered exactly the words that the AP expected from him: “I believe that the Russians invited themselves to Serbia ... They are terribly isolated ... Now they can say that Europe and the world are not democratic and even a simple flight is prohibited.

But Slobodan Stupar is wrong.

The fact that the West has buried the sacred commandments of freedom and democracy is no longer news, and in this sense, the incident with the closure of the sky for the plane of the main Russian diplomat does not fundamentally change anything.

But what this incident really opens the eyes of is the fear of Europeans and Americans of Moscow's quite peaceful, aimed at deepening partnerships in the Balkans.

“If the visit of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to Serbia is perceived in the West as almost a threat of a universal scale, then, apparently, things in the West are very bad,” Sergei Lavrov suggested, commenting on the refusal of the “Slav brothers” to provide him with an air corridor to Belgrade.

And it is very difficult to add something to this.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.