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Comment by kievins | Hacker News Reader

Same thing happened in Georgia in 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_(country)#The_South_Oss...

Same thing happened in Serbia in 1999. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo

Only in this case it was NATO who invaded, and it is viewed quite differently from the western media then what parents have cited.

The worst thing in world today is to become the rope on which the imperial forces tug to prove their strength.

Also in Cyprus in 1974: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus

Kosovo seems a much better example although I don't understand why NATO was able to enter the war against the wishes of Russia. Maybe nothing major happened because Serbia was sort of a Russian puppet state instead of being Russia itself? Or the lack of interesting resources in Kosovo? I have some remembering to do.

By the way, while reading about Kosovo's history yesterday, I noticed how beautiful Pristina's National Public Library looked: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Biblotek...

Unless you subscribe to an extreme pan Slavophilism, in which the Balkans are legally and morally Russian territory, then no, Russia had nothing to say in the Balkans.

Not Russian territory but under Soviet (and then Russian) influence. No?

No, pretty much the exact opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito%E2%80%93Stalin_split

Ah, this is very interesting, thanks for the eye-opening link! It actually might explain my previous questions about Kosovo.

Sarajevo was also a beautiful city until the Orthodox Serbs destroyed it.

It was in 1999, when Russian strength and morale (political, economic and military) was at it's nadir. Compare the two wars in Chechnya with the war in Georgia.

> The worst thing in world today is to become the rope on which the imperial forces tug to prove their strength.

Not just today -- it's been a shitty position to find oneself in since the beginning of time. The only difference today is that we think of ourselves as above such things. But clearly we're not.

I think the circumstances surrounding the conflict in Kosovo paint a starkly different picture from what's going on in Ukraine.

Big difference. Serbians under Milosevic were committing mass murder and ethnic cleansing (as they had done with Bosnia and Croatia few years earlier), while here, Ukrainians are not kicking people from Crimea out.

This is just a land grab.

>Ukrainians are not kicking people from Crimea out.

Not yet. Still, the first act of the new regime was to revoke language rights from ethnic minorities, i.e. Russians in Crimea. When this sort of thing happens, ethnic cleansing is not far away.

That's one ridiculous exaggeration. Did you even read the law you are talking about, or you are just repeating somebody else's propaganda? The law was actually criticized by Ukrainian minorities -- by Crimean Tatars [1], by Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine[2], by Congress of Ethnic Communities of Ukraine [3]. But the most important detail -- the law in fact wasn't repealed! Acting president already vetoed its repeal.

[1] http://www.unian.ua/society/669726-progolosovaniy-zakon-pro-...

[2] http://www.vaadua.org/news/zayavlenie-vaada-ukrainy-po-povod...

[3] http://old.kngu.org/kngu%20news%202012/Zayava%20Ch.html

This law does not affect Crimea as Autonomous Republic of Crimea has its own constitution, and Russian language is used as an official since 1998.

Seriously? Leaving out some details there, aren't you? Like Srebrenica?

And by "same thing" you mean that Georgia started an invasion of South Ossetia and then forced to retreat when Russian forces counter-attacked?

I wouldn't say it's the same as the number of Russians living in South Ossetia was and is really small (2 to 3%?). There are some similarities but even the way the war started seems different from what's happening in Ukraine. But it's useful context to have though.

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