MOSCOW, June 17. /TASS/. The bombings of the former Yugoslavia in 1999 will forever remain a disgraceful page in the history of all NATO member states, Secretary of Russia’s Security Council Nikolai Patrushev said in an article for the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily on Wednesday.
"The barbaric bombings of Yugoslavia were a separate disgraceful page in the history of all the NATO countries and will remain so," Patrushev noted, citing the examples of the destructive influence of new Western values on the international security system.
As the chief of Russia’s Security Council said, "the substitution of international norms with the rule of force, which is imposing ‘freedom and democracy’ with fire and a sword in places where they cannot exist by definition in this Western understanding by virtue of historical, religious, ethnological and other reasons, has already led to the tragedy of Iraq, Syria and Libya."
NATO launched its Allied Force air operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia over the situation in Kosovo on March 24, 1999. During the operation that lasted 78 days, the aircraft of NATO countries made 38,000 sorties. As a result of NATO’s bombings, from 3,500 to 4,000 people died and about 10,000 were wounded. Two thirds of them were civilians, according to Serbia’s data.
NATO’s bombings wiped out the Yugoslav military industrial infrastructure, destroyed over 1,500 populated areas, 60 bridges, 30% of all schools, about 100 monuments and 40,000 residential buildings.
NATO’s operation ended on June 10, 1999 after an agreement was signed, under which Yugoslavia started to pull out its troops from Kosovo.