On this day in 1999, NATO began bombing its illegal bombing campaign of Yugoslavia without permission from the UN Security Council.

After years of supporting right-wing nationalist forces to undermine and weaken the integrity of Yugoslavia, NATO begun its campaign to break up the socialist state. Though it claimed to be intervening to stop ethnic cleansing, the Assistant to US Secretary of Defense Strobe Talbott revealed the real reason for the war:

"It was Yugoslavia's resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform, not the plight of Kosovar Albanians, that best explains NATO's war.”
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NATO openly bragged about its destruction of Yugoslavia’s infrastructure, with its spokesperson Jaime Shea proudly saying in 1999 “And the fact that the lights went out in 70% of the country…we can turn the power off whenever we need to and whenever we want to.”