What Ukraine can learn from the Balkans - and what she cannot

Tuesday 10 February 2026

The war in Ukraine is often compared, sometimes lazily, with the wars of the Balkans in the 1990s. The analogy is tempting. Both involve the violent unravelling of imperial legacies, both are fought on Europe’s periphery yet shape the continent’s moral centre, and both have produced a familiar vocabulary of ethnic cleansing, frozen conflicts, peace conferences and weary diplomats insisting that there is ‘no military solution’. For Ukraine the Balkans offer lessons of real value. They also offer warnings about what not to learn.

At the most basic level, Ukraine can learn from the Balkans that wars of national survival are rarely short, even when the justice of the cause appears obvious. The dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was not a single war but a sequence of conflicts stretching across a decade, each feeding unresolved grievances into the next. Ukraine’s war against Russia has already lasted far longer than many expected in 2022, and the Balkan experience suggests that endurance, not dramatic breakthrough, is often what determines political outcomes. Societies that prepare psychologically and institutionally for a long struggle are better placed to survive it.

Ukraine can also learn from the Balkans the importance of state capacity during war. In Croatia and later in Bosnia, the consolidation of functioning ministries, tax systems and chains of command proved as decisive as battlefield tactics. Ukraine’s success since 2014, and especially since 2022, in maintaining fiscal discipline, digital public services and basic governance under fire stands in sharp contrast to the early Balkan wars, where institutional collapse often magnified military defeat. The lesson here is encouraging rather than cautionary — Ukraine is already applying it — but the Balkans demonstrate what happens when it is ignored.

Another genuine lesson concerns internationalisation. The Balkan wars showed that external involvement is inevitable once a conflict threatens regional stability. NATO intervention in Bosnia and later in Kosovo did not arrive quickly, cleanly or consistently — but it did arrive. Ukraine’s diplomacy has been relentless in forcing herself onto the international agenda, and the Balkans suggest that this persistence matters. Wars that are framed as peripheral or ‘local’ are easier for great powers to ignore. Wars framed as tests of international order are not.

Yet the limits of Balkan analogies are at least as important as their insights. The most dangerous false lesson is the idea that negotiated territorial partition is an acceptable or stabilising endpoint. The Dayton settlement froze Bosnia and Herzegovina into a constitutional structure so complex that it still struggles to function three decades later. Kosovo’s partial recognition continues to poison relations across the region. For Ukraine, whose territory is internationally recognised and whose population overwhelmingly rejects partition, the Balkan experience should serve as a warning rather than a template. Frozen conflicts rarely freeze resentment.

Ukraine also cannot learn from the Balkans that time naturally heals war. In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, unresolved narratives of victimhood and betrayal still shape politics a generation later. War crimes prosecutions, while morally necessary, did not by themselves produce reconciliation. Ukraine will eventually face her own reckoning — with collaborators, with returning veterans, with grief that cannot be legislated away — but the Balkans show that postponing these conversations in the name of stability merely defers instability. Peace agreements that prioritise silence over truth tend to age badly.

Another false parallel lies in the role of ethnicity. Balkan wars were framed — sometimes simplistically, sometimes accurately — as ethnic conflicts within fractured societies. Ukraine’s war is fundamentally different. It is not a civil war between communities but a war of external aggression against a sovereign state. Attempts to import Balkan-style ethnic frameworks into Ukraine risk distorting both policy and justice. Ukraine’s internal cohesion since 2022 suggests that the country’s fault lines do not run where foreign observers once assumed they did.

Finally, Ukraine cannot learn from the Balkans that justice is optional. The temptation to trade accountability for stability haunted every Balkan peace process. It produced short-term calm at the cost of long-term cynicism. Ukraine’s insistence that accountability — for war crimes, for deportations, for the destruction of civilian life — must be part of any settlement reflects an understanding the Balkans arrived at too late. Stability built on impunity is brittle.

The Balkans do not offer Ukraine a roadmap. They offer something more ambiguous and more useful — a catalogue of consequences. They show what happens when wars are allowed to smoulder, when compromises harden into constitutions, and when peace is declared before societies are ready to live with it. Ukraine’s task is not to imitate the Balkans but to study them carefully, to recognise which outcomes she must avoid as deliberately as she pursues victory. In that sense, the Balkan experience is less a lesson plan than a warning label — and Ukraine would be wise to read it closely.