And why the majority of Serbian people love him for it.

After the fall of communism and the dissolution of the federal state, marked by a struggling economy, civil unrest, and ethnic clashes, the kleptocratic autocracy of the largest successor state, propagandizing a jingoist, revanchist, and socially conservative ideology, launched a series of wars against the new countries formed within the borders of the former federal republics, under the pretext of providing protection from extermination for the speakers of its language.

Wars were waged through proxy forces aligned with the aggressor, with mostly covert military involvement from the largest former republic.

Does it sound like something from the Kremlin’s playbook? Close, but not quite.

It was Slobodan Milosevic and his clique that orchestrated and helped the Serb forces in Bosnia and Croatia, maintaining a similar despotic rule over citizens of Serbia like the one Russian ruling elite forced upon Russians, blasting mindless state propaganda, all the meanwhile creating a class of robber barons, which people in the Balkans call “tycoons”, and go by the name of “oligarchs” in the former Soviet Union. Wagner Group is not the first to employ convicted, violent criminals as soldiers. Just as the Russian Federation is considered a successor of the USSR, the Serbian government and criminal warlords claimed that it was the only true successor of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, so, with its junior partner, Montenegro, it officially fashioned itself as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Its military and police force was actively engaged in hostilities in neighboring countries, sometimes overtly, sometimes covertly.

The Russian Federation has done the same in its own backyard since the nineties – Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. While Milosevic’s reign ended after crippling economic sanctions, a NATO bombing campaign, and a popular revolt after he refused to concede an electoral defeat, Russia continued with the same antics until it culminated with the continuation of the war against Ukraine.

The predominant political sentiment in Serbia is that all of our woes are caused by a vile conspiracy of Western imperialists and the domestic fifth column and that Serbia isn’t the Greatest Place on Earth, happily stretching over territories far outside its present borders, only because Americans and Europeans hate our guts and always put us down. But all we have to do is wait patiently, be stubborn in our demands, and keep those yucky liberal values and human rights out of our society, and one day, Russia and China will rise and crush the American hegemony along with Western hypocrisy and decadence. Then we will get back Kosovo, Montenegro, Republika Srpska (large parts of Bosnia), Srpska Krajina (good portions of Croatia), maybe even Northern Macedonia, or even northern parts of Albania.

It will be grand. We just have to wait. And bring back Milosevic’s government. Like we did in 2012, led by his former information minister Aleksandar Vucic, and wait for Russia and China to finish off America. By attacking Ukraine. Because that all makes perfect sense. On Mars.

Kremlin’s brilliant plan in combating the developed countries was:

• Issue an ultimatum to NATO to abandon Eastern Europe, or else
• Continuing a war against Ukraine that the Russians and their proxies started in 2014, hoping that Ukrainians will just drop their weapons and surrender to be “liberated”
• Passing a law that forbids calling it a war
• Make a list of enemy states that consists of all the richest, most heavily armed countries on this planet
• Threaten the enemy states with nuclear weapons
• Threaten the EU with an energy embargo
• Launch a smear campaign against all of the Ukrainian people calling them active and passive Jewish Nazis
• Creating an elaborate fantasy of how Europeans are freezing and starving without Russian oil and gas
• Expanding the elaborate fantasy of how Europeans are ready to rise up against their governments, tired of imaginary hardships, and angry because their governments waste money on Ukraine
• Causing food shortages in Africa and the Middle East by disrupting trade routes in the Black Sea
• Have Kadyrov make TikTok videos
• Whine about everything
• Wait for Trump’s second term

Ukraine responded by:

• Shooting back at Russian “liberators” and asking for more ammo

The list of Russia’s enemies responded by:

• Slapping Russia’s already craptastic economy with unprecedented sanctions
• Arming Ukraine with an ever-expanding list of weaponry and equipment
• Providing Ukraine with troop training, intel, and economic aid
• Somewhat getting rid of Russian oil and natural gas imports
• Enlarging NATO by adding Finland and Sweden
• Seizing state and privately owned Russian assets in their jurisdictions
• A stampede of their companies leaving Russia

What started as a fumbled invasion on February 24th evolved in spring into a situation where Russia’s army, designed to wage World War 3 against NATO, got hopelessly stuck in a gigantic agricultural flatland.

The Russian Navy stole the show by tragicomically removing itself from the war equation when it made the mistake of coming into Ukrainian missile and later drone range. The Russian Navy is useless anyway, but most people still thought their ships and ports would be safe from missiles from the 1980s that Ukraine wielded at the start of the war. Oh well…

By autumn, it was already a full-blown fiasco, and the Russian armored-mechanized circus was retreating from pretty much everywhere before advancing Ukrainian troops could overrun them. And now they are forced to buy drones from Iran and winter infantry gear from China.

Russian targets such as fuel depots and airfields deep behind the internationally recognized border are no longer safe from Ukrainian attacks.

A disturbingly long list of industrial accidents all over the Russian Federation grows with every passing week, as one facility goes up in smoke after another, most likely caused by the local culture that praises lawlessness and embezzlement, until something blows up in their faces. The reaction of the Russian government was to impose what is forced labor in all but words on companies connected to its war effort.

Prigozhin’s mutiny, when Russia had an armed stand-off with Russia in Russia, revealed to the world the deep strategic genius of the siloviki who had the brilliant idea of giving a privately owned slave army of convicts and lunatics to a career criminal.

And Ukrainian forces are still occupying a piece of Russia around Kursk. You go, nuclear superpower. Maybe shoot one more Oreshnik dud at a bunch of civilians, that’ll show ’em.

North Korean troops coming to the rescue of Russia doesn’t exactly seem like a good omen for Moscow. Nor is Russia asking for DPRK’s ammunition and weaponry.

Chinese leadership must be watching in horror. PLA’s military junk is a cheap knock-off of Russian military junk. Ukraine is still mostly armed with equipment from the Soviet era, with some advanced Western weaponry, but even those ATACMS, Abrams tanks, and F-16s are products of the Cold War. Russians are losing against them, regardless of the fact that they share a land border, have Belarus to host their troops, and the Black Sea should be a Russian lake in a war against a country that doesn’t even have a Navy, to begin with.

Taiwan, on the other hand, is an island with a modern military armed with high-tech equipment. China isn’t exactly known for mounting massive amphibious landings.

If Westerners reacted by supporting Ukraine in this way, other than direct military confrontation with Russia, because this Kremlin’s vanity war disrupts worldwide trade and order, they would most likely go to war with the PRC immediately if they tried to disrupt the world’s semiconductor production with an ill-conceived attack on its breakaway province.

No amount of boasting from Chinese propagandists and their supporters about how citizens of developed nations couldn’t handle rising prices and loss of jobs in case of an armed conflict between China and the USA boosted by its allies can hide the fact that CCP is perfectly aware that Putin’s failed War For More Yachts would look like a picnic compared to what would happen to China if they invaded Taiwan.

PRC did get a consolation prize out of this whole mess. They can take over Russia as a vassal state, without spending a dime.

And yet, the Serbian general public and both state-controlled and independent media are all still spewing nonsense on how a world dominated by Russia and China is just around the corner, joining in on the nuclear saber-rattling and paranoia, and bending their brains backward while trying to explain how this is all somehow America’s fault.

All the while coping with the fact that a world dominated by Russia and China is not coming to help us with our expansionist ambitions.