comment: >
  
  This won't distract much.
context: There is a NATO base in Kosovo, everyone knows nothing can happen, this is just political posturing >
  
  Mighty Serbia will obviously steamroll NATO >
  
  If you listen to Serbians - they probably unironically believe it >
  
  Fans of the Cleveland Browns are convinced that the next play is the one that starts them on the path to a superbowl victory. >
  
  As a Browns fan, you’re exactly right about how that feels >
  
  Let Joey Brrr and the non-rapists carry the Ohio ball for awhile. >
  
  I just miss Baker Mayfield so much, godammit >
  
  I still can't figure out why the Colts didn't go after him instead of Matt Ryan. My youngest boy is much aggrieved. >
  
  So if Serbia and Kosovo erupts into open armed conflict again, will Russia be diverting its military resources there or not? >
  
  Not. What resources? 🤣 >
  
  They must have since they are still active in African countries. >
  
  Gunning down civilians on behalf of African military juntas is hardly resource intensive. Just a bunch of psychopathic russians with small arms. >
  
  isn't it weird that guns are called small arms but it is large arms that are called guns? >
  
  INB4 some dweeb is like "that's not a gun it's a rifle. I am very bad ass for knowing" >
  
  Hi, dweeb here. They're called small arms because we categorize guns by caliber, and weapons meant to be used by individuals or some that are crew served are considered small caliber (proportionally speaking to shit like battleship cannons). >
  
  At what point does something go from small caliber to large caliber? >
  
  Above 50 cal probably? >
  
  Putin the war criminal wants more war
  Fuck Putin >
  
  He's lived long enough to see he's wrong about everything. 
  He's lived long enough to see that democracy is stronger than autocracy, that truth always beats lies, that history will remember him as another failed despot and rat spy.
  He's lived long enough. >
  
  Poetic. >
  
  I cannot wait for an another February or October Revolution to topple Putin down of the power. >
  
  Let's do a February one and not an October one. Otherwise you'd just replace one totalitarian state with another. >
  
  But February is so close, and we just came off holidays. October gives enough time for everyone to nap, exercise, get to fighting form. >
  
  I still haven’t reached that beach body I was going for yet. It just cannot happen right now. Postpone it please. >
  
  i called this a while back, and i honestly think a lot more than this conflict is at least partially the result
  of the kremlin stirring the pot >
  
  Putin needs to be six foot under >
  
  Cheeky sods >
  
  Figured this was what was going on. A little slight of hand. >
  
  Putin is a threat to World Peace.
  Actively poking the bear so another unneeded war can break out and kill more people.
  Oh, and Kosovo is in NATO, so if Serbia attacks first then all NATO allied countries need to act.
  Fuck you and your legacy Putin. >
  
  Kosovo is not a member nation of nato. Nato however has peace keeping forces inside kosovo. 
  Putin, however, is a threat to world peace. >
  
  Serbia is also a threat, though not of the same magnitude. >
  
  
  Serbia is also a threat,
  
  Care to enlighten me? I'm not aware of the political climate there. >
  
  Since the end of the 1800s (and possibly longer), Serbian nationalists have had this idea of gathering all the slavic people into one great nation ruled from Belgrade.
  Those nationalist ideas inspired a number of wars in the early 1900s where Serbia kept expanding. To stop them, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum that would strip Serbian sovereignty and when it was partly rejected, Austria invaded which started WW1.
  The outcome of this was "funnily" that the winners of the war had a huge Serbian controlled state formed, Yugoslavia. Controlled from Belgrade, this "South Slavic" state (the meaning of the name Yugoslavia) existed into the 1990s when tensions finally caused it to break down.
  Serbia and its nationalist leader did really not like the dissolution and a war raged for years with a lot of ugliness (as in most wars, but worse than many) including genocidal slaughter of Bosnians in Srebenica. Eventually the war ended, but Serbian nationalism did not end.
  When Kosovo/Albanians in southern Serbia also started on a campaign to break out of Serbia, Belgrade again responded extremely violently and aggressively. Remembering Srebenica, western countries stepped in to defend Kosovans from a repeat, de facto removing that area from Serbia.
  We now have a pseudo state, Kosovo, and Serbian pan-slavic nationalism that has never disappeared. There are many in Serbia that believe that a war to restore their empire is the way to go.
  Serbia's constant ally through all of this has been Russia and the Soviet Union. Even when Yugoslavia refused to become a Soviet satellite state, they were still friends. This makes it hard for Serbians to go against Russia now, being their only true "friend", and it gives Russia influence on the Serbian politics. >
  
  I got to reply because you spitting straight up lies and bad history here. In the second Balkan war Bulgaria was the aggressor after being unhappy with how much land Serbia and Greece had so Serbia gained land in a defensive war.
  As for your claim of Austria invading them to stop them expanding? Maybe read about how Serbia shocked the world when they agreed to all but one point in the Austrian ultimatum and then how Austria uses the war to ethnically cleans Serbians into mass graves. 
  As for Yugoslavia, it was a Croatian and Slovenian idea from their diaspora, and to literally quote the Wikipedia page “Yugoslavia was the result of the Corfu Declaration, as a joint project of the Slovene and Croatian intellectuals…” 
  Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) were genocided by Bosnian Serbs. Even The Hague in 2016 said that the incredible inhuman piece of shit Milosevic had nothing to do with it. In fact the single largest anti war / peace demonstration during the entire Yugoslav wars was in Belgrade as Serbians was horrified what was going on in Bosnia.
  Serbia was never an ally of the Soviet Union, even almost going to war with them which resulted in Yugoslavia being the only socialist country that received aid through the USA’s Marshal Plan. 
  The amount of shit you’ve made up and how your own biases fly though your words in not only ignorant but dangerous. >
  
  Smells wrong as it's not distractable at this point. >
  
  I'm sure central Asia is looking ripe for change. Or say chechnya? >
  
  The distraction is not working. >
  
  Its working so well... >
  
  Russia stoking Gun Violence in America. >
  
  Actually Russia has been part funding the NRA - precisely for that reason.. >
  
  That was just one of the many back doors they used to funnel cash to the Republican party to help Trump win
  The NRA received 30 million from Russian interests in 2016. The NRA spent $30 million on the 2016 election. The math is not particularly difficult to do in this instance. >
  
  Yeah. That will probably work for a bit at least >
  
  I thought it was just Russia that was creating issues - and the others had decided to settle down. >
  
  Funny how a country that would get there asses handed to them from little countries like Canada and Australia. keeps trying to start this big fight they have absolutely 0 chance of winning. 
  Imagine how this would be going if we gave Ukraine long range weapons and good fighter jets lol. Zalenski would be knocking on the Kremlin that’s what would happen >
  
  And just maybe that might be the best solution ?  Maybe a dangerous strategy though. >
  
  Sounds like the Russians want to open up two more fronts !
  You have to admit their strategy is unique.  /s >
  
  Scholtz better rethink their business dealings with Serbia. It's like oops-I-did-it-again 2.0 >
  
  Totally different situation. Kosovo isn't all innocent. They tried to enforce their number plates on the northern Serbian communities of Kosovo and are denying those communities' independence and political weight, even though that was actually agreed upon, as part of a peace deal.  Recently, the mood of both countries actually was quite good, (the number plate enforcement started all this) Serbia is a pre-accession country and Kosovo aims to become one, the EU even found a solution to the number plate dispute and there are still NATO troops in Kosovo. This most definitely won't escalate. >
  
  The topic about the number plates was already resolved. Now it's about Kosovo banning the Serbian Patriarch from entering and the agreed-upon political independence of those Serb communities in Kosovo. It really isn't black and white, it's two countries provoking each other. And well there are EU and NATO countries, which to this day don't recognize Kosovo's independence. >
  
  I’m not very knowledgeable in Serbian history. Is this whole thing really escalating again because of license plates? >
  
  In my opinion, Kosovo tried to push the status quo a bit in its favor, because the Serbian position was weakened because the value of the Serbian-Russian relation degraded after the invasion of Ukraine. So, Kosovo tried to increase its tax income by forcing the Serbs in their country to stop using Serbian license plates. 
  Generally speaking, conflicts that are somewhat frozen can be reignited over pretty petty things, if they're seen as a challenge to the current status quo, usually conflicts start small, and in every round of escalation the degree of provocation and challenge to the status quo increases, because if one side challenges the status quo, the other side feels the need to do the same, which again provokes a counter-reaction. >
  
  That makes sense. Just seems weird to read at first glance. License plates potentially starting yet another European conflict. Kind of have a knack for it, don’t we? >
  
  I guess that's general human behavior, starting wars that initially started with conflicts about stuff a few months later nobody gives any shit about anymore, by then it's only about the response to the response to the response to the bullshit that doesn't really matter anymore. >
  
  So let me get this straight. Kosovo begins introducing policies that are gradually eroding the local authorities of the administrations in the semi-autonomous Serbian zones, a direct violation of the negotiated peace agreement they have with Serbia and somehow Russia is to blame because Russia has some strong desire to get their only potential ally in Europe curbstomped by NATO while the Russians are bogged down in Ukraine and unable to provide any assistance?
  And who is the source of this accusation? The Kosovo government themselves.
  Well that doesn't quite pass the smell test for me, but no doubt the rest of r/worldnews is ready to believe that Russia is behind every ill in the world regardless of if the source of such accuations is Dick Cheney or some homeless tinfoil hat wearing nutter masterbating in the street. >
  
  How are car plates eroding the agreement? >
  
  Because the Serb populations in Kosovo are granted special autonomy in many regards, one such exemption extends to official documentation. This makes transit for ethnic Serbs easier between Serbia and Kosovo. Not only do license plates make for a convenient narrative for a whole host of changes to transit documents, but it also ignores that the way Kosovo has tried to go about enforcing said changes has also breached the special autonomy granted to these regions in the previous peace agreement. This culminated when the Kosovo authorities fired a local police chief who correctly identified that the laws he was being told to enforce were in violation of the past agreement. Firing him was a even more flagrant violation, and this led to hundreds of local police officers in Serb areas of Kosovo resigning in protest against the Kosovo authorities.
  As is almost always the case with the history of the Balkans, crises like these are very complex and attempts to paint any one side as the bad guys and the others as the good guys are at best ignorant, more likely though, they are dishonest and manipulative. >
  
  
  Not only do license plates make for a convenient narrative for a whole host of changes to transit documents,
  
  Right, so plates in themselves do not violate or erode the agreement. This is the common Serbian false victim crying we’ve experienced for decades. >
  
  Ah my bad, I took you for an honest person who was just a little misinformed. If that is the point you got from my comment all I can say is at best you were reading it with a very closed mind and without understanding it st all.
  Also, most Serbians were not false victims. During the break up of Yugoslavia every side were victims and every side were perpetrators, just so happened that the Serbian population was the largest and most powerful ethnic group comprising the former state, meaning that they were the worst perpetrators of such crimes as well as the main target for other groups crimes. 
  A simple look at the the ethnicity breakdown of former Yugoslavic states like Croatia before and now will show just how effective genocide against Serbs was and maps showing the ethnic breakdown of Bosnia-Herzegovina shows that every participant was also a victim.
  The world is not one big Marvel movie, stop viewing events through an 'our side vs your side' or 'good guys vs bad guys' lense or else you'll fall for the same propaganda and misinformation techniques that persuaded Serbs, Croats and Muslims communities in Bosnia to committ horrible crimes against each other. >
  
  It's the other way around, Kosovo is trying to gain power over Serbian North by using Russia-Serbia relationship as excuse, waving American and EU flags, using Ukraine conflict against Serbia.. it's actually a sick move, but EU likes to put blinders on when convenient.. >
  
  Russia-Serbia relationship? You mean how  Serbia is unapologetically aligned with Russia? >
  
  And that is an excuse to submit people by force?? People in Kosovska Mitrovica don't give shit about Russia >
  
  Seems like you still cannot connect the dots. Either you brake the countries into pieces by their nationalities or you don't, why would Kosovo deserve independence more than Northern Kosovo? Or Srpska? Why is West allowed to brake countries and noone else? Fuck Russia, but I'll praise anyone fighting Western hypocrisy. >
  
  NATO went in to stop a genocide, one that was actually happening, rather than those 3 minutes or so where that was the excuse/lie Russia was using for what they are doing in Ukraine.
  If you support Russia here even the slightest amount you are absolutely on the wrong side of history. >
  
  You have this radical stand of anti Serbia, rather than Pro human. It's about people of Northern Kosovo's right now. What are you going to do? Play hypocrat? >
  
  I have a "radical stance" of being against people that genocide minorities.
  Serbians by and large still haven't accepted the crimes their nation has committed, and appear quite content to support the crimes Russia is committing right now. They are quite happy to complain about NATO bombing while completely ignoring what they did, and yet you have the nerve to complain about western hypocrisy? Yikes.
  From the article:
  
  A young Serb walks by a mural reading "Kosovo is Serbia - Crimea is Russia"
  
  Kosovo is not Serbia, it was taken from the Serbs when they committed genocide.
  Crimea is not Russia, it is part of Ukraine. It was invaded by Russia as a land grab, no genocide or anything of the sort was taking place there (well at least before the Russians showed up).
  The situations are not the same no matter how much you play the victim.
  Serbians throwing their lot in with Russia speaks volumes, as does Russia yet again re-stoking these tensions in the first place.
  If you want people to take you seriously, stop supporting the most evil of regimes. >
  
  Of course the situations are not the same, Albanians live in South Serbia in peace, never an issue. In Kosovo they wanted a separate Republic that led to a war, if anything, one should support now Northern Kosovo, just like Kosovo prior to that, unless you don't give a shit about human life, because of a Nations title. I don't support evil regimes, I support freedom, I'm anti NATO and anti Russia, and you can't even accept crimes you did to us. Take your blinders off. >
  
  Stoking ? Russia was and is at the heart of the Kosovan conflict ... and Syria and North Korea and China and Vietnam etc etc .. we should ha e dealt with them after ww2 >
  
  Is that all they’ve got? >
  
  And this is why Russia is the most dangerous terrorist nation in the planet.