Russia–Serbia Partnership

Russia vetoed a draft resolution in the UN Security Council on Wednesday that condemns the 1995 killings in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica as genocide.

War veterans from the Balkan war of the 1990's stand near a memorial at the memorial center Potocari, near Srebrenica, 150 kms northeast of Sarajevo, Bosnia

Ten of the Security Council's 15 members voted in favor of the document, while four, including China, abstained.

The current UNSC draft resolution on Srebrenica is the sixth version of the British resolution on Srebrenica, with the first one submitted in June. The resolution refers to the events in Srebrenica as genocide, and states that a denial of the massacre as a genocide is hindering reconciliation.

Earlier in June, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that the British draft resolution is written in the anti-Serb tone and incorrectly interprets, from a legal point of view, what happened in Srebrenica.

In July 1995, according to UN estimates, over 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in the Bosnian city of Srebrenica after the city had been taken by units of the Army of Republika Srpska.

International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice have classified the massacre in Srebrenica as genocide. Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs do not deny the crime, but do not refer to them as genocide.

On Sunday, the presidents of both the Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Serbia asked Russia to veto the adoption of the resolution in the UN Security Council.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/politics/20150708/1024374977.html#ixzz3fJSwp8lu

Russia Vetoes UNSC Resolution on Srebrenica Massacre

PapaDragon wrote:

Hannibal Barca wrote:In the same time that Serbs were licking Merkel's butt and praying to be accepted in EU.
It's about time to have a serious leader once again, to stop licking the bloody West, regroup, get back their pride,
and yeah give to those Sunni Albanians a good lesson.

Last time we had "serious leader" (    ) we ended on the brink of extinction (and most likely over it, time will tell but I wouldn't hold my breath)

Butts are licked as a survival method unless you have better approach for a country that is completely isolated and surrounded by enemies on all sides.

Regrouping usually involves licking some butts... then comes rest of the stuff you mentioned.

Also, as our neighbors have shown us, pride is waaaaaaay overrated...

PapaDragon wrote:UN resolution on Srebrenica designed to justify NATO bombings, to discredit Republika Srpska

http://tass.ru/en/opinions/807496

Author
Tamara Zamyatina

MOSCOW, July 9. /TASS/. Russia’s decision to veto the UN Security Council’s resolution on the 20th anniversary of tragic events in the Moslem enclave of Srebrenica is called upon to prevent a possible destabilization in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Balkans on the whole, a senior Russian expert on Slavonic studies told TASS on Thursday.

In addition to this, the resolution drafted by Britain was rather biased and spotlighted just one party to the ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia or, to be more precise, the Serbs, Dr. Yelena Guskova, the director of the Center for Contemporary Balkan Crisis Studies at the Moscow-based Institute for Slavonic Studies told TASS.

The UN Security Council failed to endorse the draft resolution on Srebrenica on Wednesday, as Russia, which is one of the council’s five permanent members, imposed a veto on it. The document qualified the death of about 8,000 male Bosnian Moslems in Srebrenica in July 1995 as genocide.

Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin said in this connection Russia was calling for an all-embracing investigation of criminal offences committed by members of all the ethnic communities during the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He called into question the striving by a number of Western countries to pass Bosnian Moslems off as the main victims of the wars that rocked Yugoslavia from 1992 through 2001.

"The Serbs suffered no less than others in that conflict and that’s why the international community has a fundamental task of attaining full reconciliation and bringing the situation in Bosnia back to normal," Churkin said.

All in all, the Bosnian civil war of 1992 to 1995 carried away the lives of almost 100,000 people - Moslems, Serbs and Croats.

Dr. Guskova recalled in this connection that internal law defines as genocide the actions aimed at a premeditated extermination of a nationality, as well as a racial, religious or any other historically formed cultural/ethnic group.

"No doubt the army of Bosnia’s Serb Republic didn’t have any objective of this sort," she said. "Srebrenica isn’t Babiy Yar in Ukraine where the Nazi occupiers annihilated Jews, Romani and Soviet prisoners of war in 1941."

"Quite possibly, a war crime was committed in Srebrenica but the fact is yet to be proven," Dr. Guskova said.

"In 1995, Moslem militants made amassed sorties to the Serb-populated villages in the vicinity of Srebrenica and dozens of thousands of peaceful civilians were killed," she went on. "A memorial to these victims (of the Bosnian war - TASS) is located near the enclave, along with the memorial to the Moslems who fell then."

"When Ratko Mladic, a former chief of staff of Republika Srpska’s army introduced his forces to Srebrenica, he evacuated all the women and children from the town and forwarded an organized column of Moslem soldiers to the city of Tuzla, also in Bosnia," Dr. Guskova recalled. "While the column was on the move, an exchange of fire between the sides erupted. Neither the number of those killed nor the place of their death is known precisely to this day and the lists of the victims haven’t been compiled since then."

She did not rule out that the Moslem side had conscientiously overstated the number of victims in order to get the West’s interference in the Bosnian conflict.

"Nonetheless, the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague stated in 2004 that the events in Srebrenica had been an act of genocide, even though it didn’t have weighty facts to prove the claim," Dr. Guskova said adding that if the Security Council had endorsed the resolution on Wednesday, there would have been no opportunity then to call the ‘genocide’ qualification into question.

"This would have also ruled out any studies of or research into the events of twenty years ago," she said.

Dr. Guskova believes that the British resolution was on the whole aimed to discredit Republika Srpska within Bosnia and to lay the groundwork for its elimination in the future.

"The resolution made it possible to blame one ethnic group as a culprit of all the wars that occurred in the Balkans in the 1990’s and hence to justify NATO’s UN Security Council session actions of 1999 when the pact claimed it was pounding with bombs the guilty ones," she said.

"The West is considering Bosnia’s Serb Republic as a Slavic element of the Balkans that is clinging to Russia," Dr. Guskova said in a summary. "This element is to be split or, much better, destroyed as a political factor, and the resolution would have made it possible to raise a possibility of a revision of the Dayton peace accords on Bosnia and Herzegovina, which in turn might entail elimination of the Serb Republic within it and the eventual hammering together of a monolith Bosnia and Herzegovina - something that Washington was dreaming of back in 1995."

"Russia acted as an independent factor of unbiased treatment in international relations and this means really much for Slavic peoples in the Balkans," the expert said.

http://tass.ru/en/opinions/807496

It's a shame that Russia has decided to stick its nose in; I can understand everything but things like this won't help - the memory of events such as Srebrenica are becoming key issues for dirty political games.

GarryB wrote:

It's a shame that Russia has decided to stick its nose in; I can understand everything but things like this won't help - the memory of events such as Srebrenica are becoming key issues for dirty political games.

As a citizen of the world and in particular a person from a very small country thousands of kms from anything important... here in New Zealand, I am glad that Russia is prepared to stick their nose in when the west tries to rubber stamp stuff and make their own vision the vision set in stone on official international sounding documents.

If Kosovo can have its own country why does bosnia have to remain three separate states united?

OminousSpudd wrote:Awesome, cheers Militarov. Keep 'em coming.

Russia will look into technical details of Serbia’s inquiry for the purchase of armament and S-300 air defense missile systems.

Serbia works on strengthening its military potential, Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said on Monday after meeting with visiting Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, noting that Serbia would never attack anyone but should be able to defend its citizens.

"We are intensifying our [military] production," Vucic told reporters after the talks that focused on military-technical cooperation, marking that Serbia was favoring peace and stability in the region and an improvement in ties with all its neighbours.

"Serbia will never attack anyone, but we must be ready any moment to defend our territory and our citizens," he went on.

"We keep silent, doing nothing to the threats from those who don’t refuse to buy very strong offensive weapons ," he said referring to the neighboring Croatia. Vucic also thanked Russia for respecting Serbia’s decision to be a military neutral state

"Ballistic missiles and launching equipment that Croatia plans to buy have a range of 300 and 350 kilometers. Any place in central Serbia can be targeted from Zagreb or any other place," the prime minister said.

Speaking about prospects for military-technical partnership with Russia, he said "the Russian side was prudent and concrete in offering better terms than anybody else", adding that the two countries were facing months and years of discussion on that. According to him, Russia’s S-300 missile systems were "too costly" for Serbia, but Russia had expressed a bid to help through certain agreements.

Dmitry Rogozin said Russia would look into technical details of Serbia’s inquiry for the purchase of armament and S-300. "We will render direct support to our ally in the Balkans. We will shortly consider your inquiries," he pledged.

Rogozin said Russia was not interfering in the issues related to security of Serbia, which had the right to buy highly efficient non-offensive weapons. "How does Serbia assess its situation with security? This is its personal business, we are reviewing only technical details," he added.

Vucic once again confirmed that Serbia was meeting all its commitments on the path towards the EU accession, but was not going to impose sanctions against Russia.

For incorporation of Crimea after last year’s coup in Ukraine, Russia came under sanctions on the part of the United States and many European countries. The restrictive measures were then intensified following Western and Ukrainian claims that Russia supported militias in self-proclaimed republics in Ukraine’s southeast and was involved in destabilization of Ukraine.

The Council of the European Union formally extended sanctions against Russia by six months in December, thus endorsing the decision agreed by the envoys of the 28 EU member-countries on December 18. "On December 21, 2015, the Council extended the economic sanctions against Russia until July 31, 2016," the Council said in a statement.