British Brigadier Recalls ‘World War Three’ Moment in Kosovo, balkaninsight.com

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Up until June 11, 1999, the plan was for the paratroopers of Brigadier Adrian Freer’s 5th Airborne Brigade to land at the airfield outside Pristina, but NATO commanders had a change of heart and sent them to secure the southern entrance into Kosovo instead, at the narrow Kacanik Pass.

Who knows what might have happened had they not been redirected; 250 Russians troops were already en route to the airfield over land from Bosnia and Herzegovina, stealing a march on 50,000 NATO-led soldiers rolling in from North Macedonia and Albania.

It was an ominous start to the NATO deployment on the back of 11 weeks of air strikes to drive out forces under then Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic

[…] As NATO deployed, Yugoslav and Serbian forces were supposed to withdraw simultaneously, but nothing was guaranteed.

“NATO troops decided that if the Yugoslav Army wished to be awkward, the Kacanik defile could block it,” Freer recalled, 25 years later, in an interview from his home in Scotland.

But they hadn’t counted on the Russians.

“It all happened very quickly. There was very little hold-up getting through the Kacanik defile, and then I was asked to get to Pristina airfield very swiftly,” Freer recalled. “The situation was extremely tense.”

The story of Russia’s lightning dash to Pristina and what subsequently ensued has become the stuff of legend ever since it emerged months later that the British general in charge of NATO forces deploying to Kosovo, Michael Jackson, refused an order from NATO’s American supreme commander, Wesley Clark, to evict the Russians.

“I’m not going to start World War Three for you,” Newsweek reported Jackson as telling Clark, raising serious concerns at the time over the chain of command in the Western military alliance.

Looking back, Freer said the British position of avoiding direct confrontation with Russian forces “was absolutely right”.

“At the end of the day, common sense prevailed. It would have just been a disaster,” he said. Läs  artikel

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