The atrocities committed in the town of Bucha in Ukraine awaken some of the worst memories from the Balkan Wars that took place during the 90s.
Worst of all was the Srebrenica Massacre committed by the Bosnian Serb Army, where over 8,000 men were brutally murdered.
After being surrounded for two years, the forces of general Ratko Mladic marched toward the Bosniak enclave, an area where the United Nations had deployed its peacekeeping forces, known as the Blue Helmets.
Not only couldn’t they save the innocent population from what lay ahead, but they helped separate men and women.
Many years later, general Mladic and his political chief Radovan Karadzic were tried and sentenced to life in prison for genocide.
But the first bloody massacre took place four years before Srebrenica, in the Croatian city of Vukovar.
After invading the city, Serb forces went to a local hospital where they knew some 200 Croatians were being sheltered. They took them to a farm and tortured them for hours, before killing them. At least 300 others are still missing.
Former colonel Mile Mrksic, known as the Vukovar Butcher, was sentenced to 20 years for war crimes.
By the end of the decade, other massacres happened in Kosovo and Chechnia, although on a smaller scale.
In 2008, dozens of civillians were killed during a failed attack of the Georgian Army, in an effort to regain control of southern Ossetia. And that wasn’t the last drop of blood that was shed on European soil.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
