In 2015 the Russian news agency VGTRK released documentary film “The Murder of Yugoslavia. The Shadow of Dayton”. Back then I wrote about it in Two Documentaries: “Murder of Yugoslavia” and “Democracy of Mass Destruction”, and also translated the summary, but did not undertake the translation of the documentary itself. With the parallels in today’s Ukrainian conflict and NATO’s role in it, this documentary has become even more current than in 2015. In addition, with YouTube blocking the VGTRK channel in lieu of the West’s crack-down on the freedom of speech and democracy, the original untranslated documentary became impossible to watch even in Russian.

But before we proceed to the documentary, there is another material that provides additional context and outlines many parallels with the civil war in Ukraine.

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Along the VGTRK, there were several other news agencies that got blocked in the West for speaking the truth. One such agency is RT. A few days ago they had an excellent Op-Ed by Nebojsa Malic (now mirrored here, at the blog):

How the US and NATO reuse the 1990s Yugoslavia wars playbook in Ukraine

Starting the article with “If certain strategies and tactics seem familiar, that’s because they are over 20 years old.”, he goes on pointing to many parallels.

The emotionally charged and often hyperbolic terms used by the US and its allies to describe the conflict in Ukraine gives the notion that it is something unprecedented and unseen since the Second World War. That is quite literally not true.

If anything, the behaviors, tactics and even strategies embraced by the government in Kiev and its Western patrons bear an uncanny similarity to the conflicts that destroyed Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In sharp contrast to all the reminiscing – though nowhere near enough remorse – on the recent anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, even the critics of the Western establishment seem to have forgotten about the Kosovo War, which began on March 24,1999.

…

Named ‘Deliberate Force’, that NATO operation dovetailed with Croatia’s Operation ‘Storm,’ an assault on Krajina, in August 1995. Serbs living in the historic borderlands of present-day Croatia had set up their own republic in 1992, which Zagreb denounced as “aggression” from Serbia itself – much like how Kiev, in 2014, reacted to the independence claims by the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk by denouncing it as Russian “aggression”. The US had armed, trained and advised the Croatian military for the 1995 attack, and Holbrooke even revealed that Washington had told Zagreb what to hit and when – in a preview of the US and NATO providing intelligence to Kiev.

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Do read that article in full (using the link above that points to the uncensored mirror), before watching the film.

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There are several quotes in the documentary itself that beg to be highlighted:

The Dayton agreements were perceived by the Americans as a kind of short-term deception.

Isn’t it what Minsk agreements ended up being, by Poroshenko’s Merkel’s and Hollane’s own admissions?

But on August 28, 1995, a series of unexpected and mysterious explosions occurred on the Sarajevo market in Markale. 37 civilians died, 90 people were injured.
…
Only after the war, independent experts and criminologists from a number of European states suggested that the explosion in Markale was very similar to a carefully planned provocation.

If you are thinking about the Bucha false flag or the Mariupol maternity hospital false flag, then you are on the right track.

You can download the subtitles used for the video as a separate file. Below is the complete transcript for the ease of reference.

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The Murder of Yugoslavia.
The Shadow of Dayton.

On the 21st of November 1995
the information agencies of the world sent out an urgent news from the United States of America.
On the military base in Dayton, the presidents of Serbia, Croatia,
and the leaders of Bosnian Muslims signed an agreement
on the cessation of civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In accordance with it, this part of the former Yugoslavia
was now divided into the Muslim-Croatian Federation and the Republic Srpska.
To control their borders and support the truce,
international forces under the command of NATO were introduced there.
A total of 60,000 people, half of whom were Americans.
The Serbs, who controlled almost 75% of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
made serious concessions and agreed to keep only 49% of the territory.
This was done to end the civil war, which by that time had actually destroyed the former Yugoslavia.

[ Miroslav Lozansky, War correspondent of newspaper “Politika” (Serbia) ]
We can look at Dayton in a positive light,
because without it, there would be no Republic Srpska.
The Serbs kept their presence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, kept their houses
and did not undergo a new genocide, such as during the Second World War.
They created Republic Srpska, an entity that is not a state, but that has all the state powers.
In Dayton, US President Clinton told the journalists of the key role of Slobodan Milosevic
in the ending of the civil war, and called the Serbian President a guarantor of peace in the Balkans.
Just a few years after these statements,
Serbia will be hit by a destructive missile-bomb attack from the US and NATO.
Serbia will lose Kosovo, and Slobodan Milosevic, the guarantor of peace,
will die under mysterious circumstances in the prison of the Hague Tribunal.
Former Minister of Information of Republic Srpska, Miroslav Tohol,
believes that the Dayton agreements were only an intermediate link
in the strategic plans of the United States and its allies to promote NATO to the East.

[ Miroslav Tohol, Minister of Information of Republic Srpska in 1992-1995 ]
This Bosnian and, generally, the whole Yugoslavian crisis
was caused by political means in order for the NATO troops
to go beyond the zone of their responsibility for the first time in history,
and act contrary to the decisions of international organisations and the UN Security Council.
However, NATO countries were not going to ask anyone for permission to attack the Serbs.
The Dayton agreements were perceived by the Americans as a kind of short-term deception.
To stuff a candy in our mouths and say that peace has come,
and then establish a certain type of protectorate and introduce their troops into the Balkans.
The famous Serbian director, Emir Kusturica,
is convinced that in the case of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union,
the West deliberately provoked and ignited inter-ethnic conflicts
in order to eliminate its geopolitical competitors.

[ Emir Kusturica, Film director (Serbia) ]
When the New York Times wrote in 1991 that
a civil war was being prepared in Yugoslavia, I asked myself a question.
If they know about it, why don’t they help to prevent it?
But then I did not take into account the fact that the world system
is actually a hostage of such a vicious circle,
in which wars and interests of Wall Street are closely intertwined
with the struggle for oil wells and resources.
The leitmotif of all this is the desire to block Russia’s road to Europe.
And to always punish the Serbs for being close to the Russians,
and for that, what unites our peoples.
The civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina
became the most destructive military confrontation in Europe since the Second World War.
Initially, the conflict was provoked by a one-sided decision of Bosnian and Croatian deputies
of the local parliament to leave Yugoslavia.
At the same time, they completely ignored the opinion of Bosnian Serbs,
who constituted more than 31% of the population of this Yugoslav Republic.

[ Miroslav Lozansky, War correspondent of newspaper “Politika” (Serbia) ]
In October 1991, a secret night session was held in the parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
where two peoples, Croats and Bosnian Muslims,
said that Bosnia and Herzegovina is no longer part of Yugoslavia.
They did it without the consent of the third nation – the Serbs.
They simply deceived the Serbian deputies by not informing them that there would be a session
dedicated to the secession from Yugoslavia and did not invite them to it.
In fact, the Bosnian Serbs were given to understand that from now on they will have a role
of an ethnic minority without any rights in the new nationalistic state of Bosnians and Croats.
In response, Serbian communities began to form their own authorities.
The European countries tried to stop the development of the conflict
by proposing a plan for a peaceful division of Bosnia and Herzegovina
into territories in which the rule is passed on to the ethnic majority.
In the spring of 1992, this plan was approved by representatives of all three communities.
But the unexpected intervention of the United States destroyed all hopes for peace.

[ Miroslav Tohol, Minister of Information of Republic Srpska in 1992-1995 ]
There we agreed on everything, that later, as a result of the Dayton Agreement,
received not only the Serbs, but also all the parties in Bosnia.
However, the American ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann, then told the Muslims:
“Give up on this agreement.”
After that, of course, the war began.
Such a way to manage a crisis.
This term is now widely used in the Western publications.
On the 1st of March 1992, in one of the old districts of Sarajevo,
Bosnian Muslims unexpectedly shelled the Serbian wedding procession coming out of the church.
As a result of the attack, the father of the groom, Nikola Gardovic, was killed.
This murder provoked large-scale clashes throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina.

[ Miroslav Lozansky, War correspondent of newspaper “Politika” (Serbia) ]
In April 1992, there was an invasion of the regular Croatian army across the Sava River
in the direction of the city of Šamac in the northern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The massacre of the Serbs in the village of Sijekovac began.
More than 50 unarmed Serbian residents were killed.
This was done by the forces of the invading Croatian army and the local Croatian community.
After that, the disaster began.
The civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina lasted almost four years.
As a result, one of the most beautiful and prosperous regions of Europe
was completely destroyed and flooded with blood.

[ Aleksei Denisov ]
According to official data, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina took the lives of 100,000 people,
according to unofficial data, twice as many.
Of the 4.5 million inhabitants of the republic, more than two million became refugees.
The rivers of blood forever divided the lives of two communities –
the Serbian and the Muslim-Croatian.
Serbian residents in the city of Goražde met the Russian film crew with a greeting song.
The local choir bears the name of Great Martyr St. George the Victorious.
The oldest Orthodox church in this city was named in honour of this saint.
It was built in 1446.
In the beginning of the 16th century,
the first printing house was opened here in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
that printed books in the Church Slavic language.
Before the collapse of Yugoslavia, Orthodox Serbs and Bosnian Muslims lived peacefully in Goražde.
But in 1992, everything changed.
Islamic extremists, who took a course to create an ethnically pure Bosnian state,
burned and plundered the ancient temple.
The Serbs, who tried to protect their shrine, were brutally killed.

[ Archpriest Novica Chebech, the rector of the church of Great Martyr St. George]
In 1992, at the end of August, more than 90% of the Serbian population
was forced to leave the territory of the parish council of the city of Goražde.
On the way, they were ambushed.
Many died then, including children, their mothers, fathers, old and young.
The temple was left without parishioners.
Muslim extremists first robbed it, and then burned it.
When I came here in 1996, there was a real disaster here.
A burned-down ruin.
No books, no icons, no clothes, no chronicles.
Everything perished.
Therefore, we had to serve and restore the church from scratch.
Those who were interested in inciting national and religious hostility in the territory of Yugoslavia,
did not even refrain from the mockery of the dead.
When the Orthodox Serbian temple was robbed and burned,
the Orthodox cemetery was also desecrated here.
More than 140 tombs were destroyed.
It can be seen that many graves were opened up.
I still do not understand what they were looking for in them.
Many tombstones have now been restored by us,
but there are also those that are still waiting for their time.
Like this one, for example.

[ Aleksei Denisov ]
Today, the invisible border between Republic Srpska and the Muslim-Croatian Federation
in Bosnia and Herzegovina is marked with such signs.
There are no checkpoints or barriers here any longer.
But neither the Bosnian Serbs nor the Muslims now visit each other without due necessity.
In 1992, the house of the pensioner Veljko Lasica was burned down by his former neighbours.
The car which he and his family used to run away from Goražde was shelled from an ambush.
His daughter and Veljko himself were seriously injured.
He is now disabled – one leg had to be amputated.
The war between different communities, says Lasica, was provoked on purpose,
in order to destroy the big and strong Yugoslavia.

[ Veljko Lasica, resident of town Goražde]
Before the war, there was Yugoslavia, and we lived together. Everything was calm.
We went to visit each other at holidays, at weddings.
We swam together, worked together. We were together everywhere.
We lived almost like brothers.
But someone sowed this discord between us,
threw us this accursed bone, and we picked it up.
The West made us quarrel, damn them.
And we, unfortunately, followed that provocation, and this led to such sad results.
The bloody confrontation in Bosnia and Herzegovina
was accompanied by all the horrors of civil and religious wars.
Ethnic cleansing, secret concentration camps, torture, and mass rapes.
At the same time, historically, all the participants of the conflict
once belonged to a single Slavic people with a common language and culture.
The division into Catholics, Muslims, and Orthodox
took place as a result of the five-century Ottoman yoke,
foreign invasions, and the expansion of the Vatican.

[ Miroslav Lozansky, War correspondent of newspaper “Politika” (Serbia) ]
Historians say that Bosnian Muslims were once Slavs and Christians.
This is proven by their surnames.
But the West used the confrontation of these
three religions very pragmatically in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
For the West, it does not matter whether you are a Catholic, Orthodox, or Muslim.
They only rely on those who act in their interest.
The most striking contrast in Bosnia and Herzegovina is that of the fabulous beauty
of the local nature with the horrors that took place on this land more than 20 years ago.
The native village of Milan Savich, Jelashce, no longer exists.
In August 1992, all its inhabitants were cut down
by a detachment of Bosnian Islamists who unexpectedly attacked from the forest.
Milan himself survived only because
the day before he went to visit his relatives in another city.

[ Milan Savich, resident of town Jelashce (Republic Srpska) ]
For more than 20 years, no one has paid for the crime
that was committed here, in my village.
My father, mother, my uncle, and other innocent people died back then.
They did nothing wrong to anyone.
They were ordinary peasants, honest and good people.
According to Milan, the bandits spared no one.
In one house, almost the entire Jelacic family was cut down.
Grandfather, grandmother, mother and two children aged 10 and 8.
Their father, who was in another village at that time, lost his mind upon returning home.
Milan’s parents and uncle, who came to help collect hay, died that day.
Even 23 years after the tragedy,
it is difficult for him to come to his house, where he was born and raised.
Here you can still see the bullets that killed his parents.
My parents and uncle were killed here.
Here are traces of the bullets that killed them.
Here my mother was killed,
here they killed my father,
and here my uncle was lying.
Here you can see the traces of the bullets that hit this wall and this stone.
Milan buried his parents at the old village cemetery.
Together with these peasants, the village of Jelacic also died forever.
Information agencies and foreign TV channels did not report anything about this tragedy,
as well as about many other crimes against the Serbs
on the territory of former Yugoslavia.
Their opponents were exclusively shown as victims.
The strange blindness and one-sidedness
in the lighting of the conflict, according to Serbian analysts,
was the result of a total information war,
which the Western countries waged at the then leadership of Serbia,
because of its attempts to preserve the united Yugoslavia.

[ Miroslav Koich, Deputy of the People’s Assembly of Republic Srpska ]
Even before the war, they had a clear plan on
how to destroy and dismember Yugoslavia,
and to drive the Serbs into a kind of reservation,
so that they lived only within one republic, Serbia.
Such a plan was prepared back in 1990.
It was created by the then leaders of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Franjo Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic.
External forces supported them, especially America and Germany,
and therefore they both believed that they could simply kill one part of the Serbs,
turn the other into Catholicism, and drive away the third part into Serbia.
At the same time, Western journalists completely concealed the facts of participation in the war
on the side of Bosnian units of thousands of Islamic terrorists from other countries.

[ Miroslav Lozansky, War correspondent of newspaper “Politika” (Serbia) ]
The information war today is a normal component of the war.
It can be even more important than missiles, bombs and tanks.
Radarfin and Norton Hill offered their services to Milosevic at a price of $16 million a year,
to promote the image of Serbia in the West.
Milosevic refused, saying, God and the truth are on the Serbian side.
But as we know, God is high above, and the truth is far away.
Nowadays, you must pay to the Western media for the truth.
They do not publish the truth only because it is the true.
You must pay for it.
Not a single Western journalist will ever go against the mainstream.
In addition to the information war,
Western countries also declared an economic war on the Serbs.
Harsh sanctions were imposed on Serbia for
the support of the compatriots and the aid to the refugees.
Their main victims were the most defenceless categories of the population:
the elderly and children.
But for some reason, the world community did not care about their fate.

[ Miroslav Tohol, Minister of Information of Republic Srpska in 1992-1995 ]
This system of sanctions is always designed not only to cause economic damage to the state,
but also to weaken the resilience of its citizens, their moral values and self-respect.
A people that respects itself is invincible.
Sanctions are designed to undermine this spirit, to humiliate you,
so that you get a bad opinion of yourself,
so that you give up your historical rights and principles.
As a result, for the attempt to resist the destruction of Yugoslavia,
the Serbs in fact ended up in a complete economic, political and military blockade.
Sanctions were not cancelled even when in 1994,
Milosevic closed the border between Greater Serbia and Republic Srpska in Bosnia
to demonstrate to the West the desire for peace.
On the contrary, the pressure on Belgrade only intensified,
and NATO aviation began to bomb Bosnian Serbs.

[ Miroslav Tohol, Minister of Information of Republic Srpska in 1992-1995 ]
When we complained to one of our friends, a priest,
that we were cornered, that we had no communication,
that we were isolated in a diplomatic sense and could not go anywhere in the world, he said:
“You know, this does not mean that you are doing something wrong.”
“Christ was also alone on Golgotha, but he alone was in the right there.”
Despite the economic blockade and information pressure,
Bosnian Serbs managed to defend their republic
and break the course of the war imposed on them.
By 1995, they controlled almost 75% of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
But on August 28, 1995,
a series of unexpected and mysterious explosions occurred at the Sarajevo market in Markale.
37 civilians died, 90 people were injured.
Just 2-3 minutes later,
the film crews of the leading Western
TV companies were already at the scene of the tragedy,
stating that it was a mortar shelling.
By a strange coincidence,
the explosions occurred just on the eve of a meeting between
the representatives of the US Secretary of State with the leader of Bosnia Muslims, Izetbegovich.
The US and its allies immediately blamed the Serbs for the tragedy,
and already on the 30th of August,
NATO countries began the military operation
under the code name of the “Thoughtful Force”.
The units of Republic Srpska
were hit by a powerful missile-bomb attack,
as a result of which the civilian population was also injured.
Only after the war, independent experts and criminologists
from a number of European states
suggested that the explosion at Markale
was very similar to a carefully planned provocation.
Its goal was to create a favourable pretext
for the open intervention of the US and its NATO allies
into the civil war in the Balkans.

[ Miroslav Lozansky, War correspondent of newspaper “Politika” (Serbia) ]
Some studies say that the incident in Markale was
entirely rehearsed in the studio of the American company
Military Professional Resources Incorporated.
This is an organisation that provides military services related to logistics, training and planning.
The pathologists who later examined the bodies,
found that the victims were mainly injured in the legs.
No one had injuries in the upper part of the body.
But it’s impossible that the fragments of a mortar shell
were scattered only at a height of 20-40 cm above ground.
This fact aroused suspicions that, perhaps,
some explosive devices had been installed in advance under the stalls.
Similar technologies were used against Belgrade in 1999.
Then, under the pretext of protecting the Albanian population in Kosovo,
NATO aviation was destroying the infrastructure of Serbia for 11 weeks,
disregarding even schools and hospitals.
As a result of this aggression, 2,500 Serbs were killed, and 12,500 were injured.
Then the US and its European allies tore Kosovo away from Serbia
for the first time since the Second World War
changing the borders of an independent state
with the help of rocket-bomb strikes.
According to the famous director Emir Kusturica,
this demonstrative massacre of Yugoslavia became the decisive step of America
on the path to the creation of a unified unipolar world,
where only the chosen and the rich decide what is good and what is evil,
whom to punish and whom to pardon.

[ Emir Kusturica, Film director (Serbia) ]
We can view the fate of Serbia and Russia,
which unites us and makes our peoples kindred,
through the prism of an idea that has been renewed for already 200 years.
This idea has existed since the times of the Napoleonic syndrome and Hitler,
and up to our days:
The West is advancing to the East, but the East is not advancing to the West.
The European culture, under the pressure from America,
is rejecting itself and its roots.
Thus, they automatically consider Russia and Orthodoxy
as an outdated version of humanity.
However, the Eastern peoples are the best proof that this is not so.
There are Chinese, Japanese, Koreans,
who express their religiosity as a cultural self-identification.
I believe that Orthodoxy is a certain kind of culture that
prevents the Western corporate capitalism from achieving the final world triumph.
The forces that poured oil into the fire of the Balkan conflict
were clearly poorly familiar with the history of this region.
According to the Serbs, the desire to take up to arms
was motivated not only by the new aggressive reality,
but also by the historical memory.
The foreign political technologists clearly did not take into account that
the people, who defended their right to life, despite the centuries-long occupation
and bloody genocide, would fight to the end.
The city of Niš in the south of Serbia.
The future Roman Emperor Constantine the Great was born here.
And one of the main European roads to Constantinople (Tzargrad) passed it.
At the beginning of the 19th century, Niš became one of the centres
of the Serbian uprising against the five-century long Turkish yoke.
One of the most terrible monuments of the European continent is under this chapel.
Çelikula – The Tower of the Skulls.
In 1809, the Turkish army
attacked the detachments of Serbian insurgents on the mountain of Çigar.
When the enemies broke through the defences and were already celebrating victory,
the Serbs blew up their gunpowder warehouse.
As a result of the monstrous explosion,
all the last defenders of Çigar and several thousand Turks were killed.

[ Aleksei Denisov ]
The Turkish governor of Niš, Khurshid Pasha, ordered to build this tower
from almost a thousand heads of the dead Serbian soldiers.
He ordered to fill the skin, torn off the skulls, with cotton and sent it to the Turkish Sultan in Istanbul
as a symbol of victory over the Serbs.
Serbian prisoners of Niš, who built this terrible tower, were also killed
and their heads embedded into the last, upper row of the tower.

[ Boyana Neshich, historian (town Niš) ]
The Turks erected this monument in an attempt to completely destroy
in the hearts of the Serbs the desire to fight for freedom and to resist the invaders.
Having built Çelikula and embedded into it the heads of Serbian patriots,
they believed that in this way they forever broke the resistance of the people.
But in this way they achieved the opposite result.
It was after this, that the Serbs really got the desire to free themselves
and drive away the vile invaders, whose yoke they endured for 500 years.
In 1833, the famous French poet Lamartin visited the Tower of Skulls.
Stunned by its appearance, he wrote,
Let the Serbs take good care of this monument.
It will teach their children what the independence of a nation means.
Showing them what price their fathers paid for it.
The latest terrible genocide
was experienced by the Serbs already in the 20th century,
during the Second World War.
On the Drina River, not far from Višegrad, there is a place called Stary Brod.
Today, you can only get to it by water.
In 1942, on these shores, the Croatian Ustashas,
who were allies of Hitler’s Germany,
brutally killed more than 6,000 Serbian refugees.

[ Dragan Vukotich, Priest of the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (town Višegrad) ]
There was a big pogrom of Serbian population.
People tried to move to Serbia, because there were two ferries here.
But the Ustashas caught up with them,
subjected them to inhuman torture, and then killed them.
A lot of civilians died, mostly women and children.
One German officer told that he saw more than 300 Serbian girls
jumping from this cliff into the abyss.
They did it to avoid to be raped and tortured.
It is known that the term “ethnic cleansing”
appeared during the Second World War
in the independent Croatian state, created with the support of Hitler and Mussolini.
The brutality of Croatian Ustashas, who, before murdering, stabbed out the eyes of the Serbs
and cut open their stomachs, shocked even Hitler’s generals.
One of them, Glaise von Horstenau, called the actions of his Croatian allies
for an indescribable swinishness of a gang of murderers and criminals.
On one of the walls of the chapel,
which was erected in memory of the Serbian martyrs,
the artist also inscribed the name of the girl Milica,
who was killed by a NATO bomb in 1999.

[ Dragan Vukotich, Priest of the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (town Višegrad) ]
We believe that the NATO bombings of Serbia
continued the genocide that the Ustashas conducted in 1942.
Before that, there was 1914,
when Austria-Hungary attacked the Serbs,
then followed by the Second World War.
Therefore, the latest war here
is simply a continuation of a long-lasting genocide.
It is impossible to understand the origins of the Balkan conflict
without knowing the history of this region.
When Yugoslavia fell apart, Boban Inzic was 18 years old.
In 1992, he, like many Serbs who until then lived in a united big country,
suddenly turned into a representative of a disenfranchised minority
in the nationalist state of Bosnians and Croats.
The war, in his opinion, was provoked by those who dreamed of destroying
the strong Slavic state in the south of Europe.
No one asked the opinions of the Serbs and the Muslims regarding this war, to start it or not.
If the West and America want it, then our opinion is of no interest to anyone.
There is always a possibility of an explosion here, because there are many smouldering conflicts.
If someone wants, the war can be provoked even tomorrow.
Just like in 1992, no one will be asking neither the Serbs nor the Muslims
According to Boban, the heaviest battles near Višegrad
were for the dominant height of Zaglavka.
It was here that he was seriously injured.
The bullet hit the lungs.
He survived by a miracle.
20 or maybe more of our soldiers died on this road.
The roads here are very winding,
and someone died at almost every turn.
The earth of Zaglavka literally moans under the weight of metal.
Even 20 years after the end of the war,
you can’t walk along the slopes because of the remaining mines.
Everywhere, there are the decaying remains of ammunition boxes
and things used by the Serbian militiamen.
Together with them the volunteers from Russia held the defence at Zaglavka.
A Russian volunteer, Konstantin Bogoslovsky, died here.
When we visit this place, according to the Serbian custom,
we leave Rakija here,
so that the person who passes by this cross,
could commemorate the souls of our fallen soldiers.
The monastery of St. Sava Serbian was built in memory of the defenders of Zaglavka
on one of the mountain slopes after the war.
Memorial planks are installed here, with Serbian and several Russian surnames.
† Konstantin Bogoslovsky, Rus, 1970 – 1993

[ Archpriest Rajko Cvetkovich, The rector of the temple of the Holy Trinity (town Rogatitsa) ]
I had a parish in Višegrad when Russian volunteers arrived, about 20 people.
They were exceptionally pious.
† Dmirty Popov, Rus, 1968 – 1993
For me, as a priest, it was wondrous, why such young people came to us.
After all, death walks here.
I asked them all the time, do you know that there is a war here?
They answered, we came to fight for the Orthodox Christians.
But do you understand that you can die?
And they told me, if it is God’s will, then we are obedient to God’s will.
Back then, I told many of our Serbian fighters:
look at the faith of these people and do not be afraid of anything.
It was a special occasion.
People said, Russia is with us, it means that victory will be ours.
Every year, on the 19th of May, the fighters of the Višegrad Brigade of Republic Srpska
gather at the city cemetery to commemorate their comrades-in-arms.
The veterans of the brigade and the residents of Višegrad
place a wreath at the memorial to the Russian volunteers.
According to the Serbs, despite the fact that the number of Russian volunteers was small,
their appearance in that difficult time greatly strengthened the spirit of the people.
“In Memory of brothers – the Russian volunteers who died for the Republic of Serbia in the Patriotic defensive war of 1992 – 1995. Eternal glory, and God shall forgive their souls.”
Mostly young people aged 25 to 30 were coming from Russia to Republic Srpska.
Many of them had served in the Soviet Army before that.
Here they still remember the words of one of the former Soviet officers,
who came from St. Petersburg and died at the very end of the war.
“We are fighting not only for the Serbian brothers,”
“but also for our Russia and for all Slavs.”
“Because as soon as the Americans finish with the Balkans,”
“they will creep to us.”

[ Luka Dragichevich, The commander of the Višegrad Brigade (Republic Srpska) ]
The first group of the Russian volunteers, 12 people,
came from the faraway Siberia in November 1992.
For our soldiers, it was a very important event.
We felt that we were not alone.
† Nimenko Andrey Nikolaevich, 1971 – 1992, Russian volunteer
In battles, they behaved excellently.
We often assigned them tasks related to reconnaissance.
They went to the enemy rear together with the most experienced Serbian soldiers.
† Kotov Gennadiy Petrovich, 1960 – 1993, Cossack colonel
Your guys performed their tasks simply fantastically.
I remember that one of them was wounded by a sniper.
When we together with the comrades came to pick him up, he was smoking,
and the tobacco smoke was coming out through two bullet holes in his cheeks.
But the Russian did not complain, he smiled.
It was a shock for me.
He was wounded, but acted as if nothing had happened.
The collapse of Yugoslavia was a bloody steamroller that crushed millions of human fates.
For those who lost their loved ones in this war, life will never be the same again.
Many Serbs, remembering their dead, often compare the events in Yugoslavia
with what is happening today in Ukraine.
In these events, they recognise familiar features of the nightmare
that once destroyed their own country.

[ Miroslav Tohol, Minister of Information of Republic Srpska in 1992-1995 ]
What is happening now in Ukraine is very similar
to the events that took place on the territory of former Yugoslavia.
In fact, it is the same scheme.
One specific political group
is sponsored and prompted to violate the rights of other citizens of the country,
whom it declares enemies.
The use of force against opponents becomes the norm.
Naturally, there is resistance in society.
People begin to fight against the violators, and, as a result, the country collapses.
But the problem of Ukraine was not created for the sake of Ukraine.
Ukraine itself is of no interest to the West.
An attempt is being made in Ukraine to wage a war against Russia.
The blow is aimed at Russia.
Those who do not realise it, understand nothing in geopolitics.
The moral improvement of humanity has almost always lagged behind
the technological progress, says film director Emir Kusturica.
But today, the gap between them
becomes especially dangerous for the entire world civilisation.

[ Emir Kusturica, Film director (Serbia) ]
In my film “Underground” there is a scene where a monkey is rampaging inside a tank.
Someone shouts, “Be careful, a monkey has climbed into the tank!”
But suddenly you can see as the monkey loads the gun and shoots.
Today, man has a huge amount of technical achievements,
and therefore his position is very complex.
It is more difficult for him to survive, or even simply, to live.
I believe that the Western civilisation
perceives its technologies as a confirmation of its own rightness.
However, at the same time, due to its own constant tension, hostility,
and the desire to conquer everything that can provide it with an easy life,
degrades to a complete lack of soul.
This soulless state will determine whether this civilisation will exist or not.
Only the faith in the holy ideals saves a person from being lost forever.