Ten Years After: Democratisation and Security Challenges in South East Europe

2001

NATO War in Kosovo and the CIS: Short– and Long–Term Effects
Arkady Moshes

Abstract

While the implications of the NATO war against Yugoslavia for European security, international law, relations between Russia and the West have been widely debated since the moment the air strikes began, its impact on intra-CIS developments and policies of CIS member states, including Russia, on the post-Soviet space remained largely outside the focus of analysis. Such an approach appears to be erroneous, for some visible or latent processes, triggered by NATO actions, in future may well become an issue on the European security agenda.

Although, generally speaking, the CIS was affected by the Kosovo crisis in a many-fold and contradictory way, one critically important result does not raise doubts. After the 1999 war practically all the CIS states explicitly or implicitly realised that use of military force in order to achieve political goals became openly possible, not to say — required, in present-day Europe. Many of them started to shape their security and defence policies correspondingly. Concrete steps naturally varied from country to country, but the common process of creating, or strengthening, or allying oneself with somebody else’s, power capabilities, was activated.

This paper intends to draw a general picture of how the post-Soviet space responded to the challenge of the war in Kosovo.

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