In one corner of Kosovo, cheers still ring out for Vladimir Putin

Many Ethnic Serbs Are Anti-Nato Due To 1999 Bombings That Broke Serbia’s Grip On Territory

Mitrovica (Kosovo): When Europeans and Americans recoiled in horror this spring at evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine, Nebjosa Jovic, a university administrator in northern Kosovo, decided he had to act: He organised a street protest to cheer Russia on. “We wanted to send a message to the West, especially its headquarters in the US, to stop persecuting Russians,” Jovic said.

Only a few people showed up, Jovic said, because of the “circle of fear” that envelops northern Kosovo, a mostly ethnic Serb region out of step with the rest of the country, where ethnic Albanians, most of whom strongly support Ukraine, make up more than 90 percent of the population. Viewed from London or Washington, the horrors visited on Ukraine by Russia offer a clear and inescapable moral choice. But, filtered through the prism of grievance and history in places tormented by their own strife, Ukraine’s misery fades in favour of local claims to victimhood.

“Russia is the only glimmer of hope we have left,” said Milos Damjanovic, a local historian in the mainly Serb part of the divided city of Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, and a fervent believer that the West and its Nato military alliance were responsible for the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, of which Kosovo was part until the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

On the main road out of Mitrovica to the north — past a guard post manned by American soldiers — a billboard assures local Serbs that they are not standing alone against the West and still have influential friends: It displays pictures of President Vladimir Putin of Russia, President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and the Serbian tennis star Novak Djokovic, hailed as “honorary citizens” of a nearby ethnic Serb settlement.