This commentary is by Dean Pineles of Stowe. After he retired as a Vermont trial court judge, he and his wife, Kristina, moved across the globe to the Republic of Georgia. After that assignment, they moved to Kosovo, where Dean served as a criminal court judge while Kristina taught business communications.
Following my retirement from the Vermont trial bench in 2005, I actively engaged in international rule-of-law work, including many short-term assignments as a judicial adviser in Russia and Kazakhstan in the mid-2000s, and long-term residential assignments in the country of Georgia, also as a judicial adviser (2008-09), and Kosovo as an international criminal judge (2011-13).
Since then, I have closely followed events in Kosovo and the Balkans, and have written extensively about developments in the region. I have written a memoir about my experiences, “A Judge’s Odyssey,” to be released this summer by Rootstock Publishing in Montpelier.
The Kosovo precedent
As the world recoiled in horror, Russia recently invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine without provocation. This crisis was a long time in the making, with important historical antecedents, such as Ukraine being a former Soviet republic, and Russian President Putin’s long-held ambition to recreate Mother Russia. Putin also wished to block any possibility that Ukraine would join the EU and NATO.
But it is also important to understand that other events have played an important part in influencing Russia’s geopolitical strategy over the last two decades.
In 1999, NATO intervened with an intensive bombing campaign in the brutal internecine war between Serbia and its breakaway province of Kosovo, in which Serbia engaged in ethnic cleansing of the majority population of Albanian Kosovars, forcing nearly a million refugees to flee and creating a humanitarian crisis. After 78 days, NATO prevailed and the war ended in June 1999, following which the UN took control of Kosovo.
NATO established a peacekeeping force in Kosovo in which many nations have participated, including the U.S. Russia strongly opposed NATO’s intervention and has been Serbia’s staunch ally to this day.
Then, in 2008, Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, with immediate recognition by many Western countries. This watershed event infuriated Putin, who claimed it created a precedent that the West would come to regret, and he was right.
Just several months later, in August 2008, Russia invaded the country of Georgia, a former Soviet republic that was leaning toward NATO and the EU, under the pretext that Russian speakers and passport holders in the breakaway province of South Ossetia were being threatened by the Georgian military.
Russian tanks and military personnel quickly poured through the Roki Tunnel separating the two countries as if they had been waiting for this moment, and Russian forces quickly overwhelmed the Georgian military. I was working in Georgia at the time of the invasion and was evacuated to Armenia until hostilities ended.
Russia immediately recognized the independence of South Ossetia and another rebellious province, Abkhazia, and continues to do so to this day. Thus, the Kosovo precedent was fully implemented. Western countries were incensed, but took little action.
An ongoing debate
In 2010, the International Court of Justice, in a legal challenge brought by Serbia, ruled that Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence did not violate international law. Russia would argue that this result should apply equally to South Ossetia and Abkhazia. (I arrived in Kosovo shortly thereafter in early 2011 and remained for 28 months.)
Then, in 2014, the restive province of Crimea declared its independence from Ukraine following an incursion by Russian soldiers and a popular referendum by the citizens of Crimea. The written declaration of independence actually cites the Kosovo precedent as one of the legal justifications for breaking away from Ukraine.
Crimea was subsequently annexed into the Russian Federation. Again, the Western powers did little.
During the last eight years, Russian separatists have fought the Ukrainian military in the Donbas region of Ukraine. One of Putin’s first acts after the invasion of Ukraine began nearly three weeks ago was to recognize the independence of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, both of which are in Donbas, again utilizing the Kosovo precedent, although not explicitly.
There is an ongoing debate as to whether the events in Kosovo actually established a precedent under international law, which Western countries would deny. They argue that Kosovo was a unique situation, a one-off, because it was initiated and justified as a humanitarian mission limited to stopping the bloodbath and ethnic cleansing.
But the concept appears to remain alive — at least in the mind of Vladimir Putin. If he is successful in Ukraine, will he then move on to Moldova, another former Soviet republic that shares a border with Romania, a member of both NATO and the EU, under some flimsy guise of provocation as in Georgia, Crimea and Donbas?
If there is any upside to the ongoing Ukrainian tragedy, it is that NATO and the EU may be more inclined to integrate Kosovo into these alliances as a further bulwark against Russian meddling in the Western Balkans.
