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Never mind that Russia is itself being incoherent in continuing to insist that Kosovo’s independence from Serbia is still illegal

NATO’s air war on Kosovo and Serbia in 1999 was, like the Iraq war in 2003, conducted without the legal approval of the United Nations.

Last February’s recognition by many Western countries of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia again lacked formal UN blessing (thanks to Russia’s threatened veto).

Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic long oppressed the Kosovo Albanians, as well as perpetrating war and ethnic cleansing right across former Yugoslavia. But it was the Georgians who ended up as the bigger victims of ethnic cleansing in Abkhazia in the 1990s, and have been again in South Ossetia in the past three weeks.

Motive provides an even clearer difference. Throughout the 1990s the Americans and Europeans were extremely reluctant to get involved in the Balkans.

After Milosevic’s withdrawal from Kosovo in 1999, the main role of the UN and NATO forces in the province was to protect the Serb minority and Serb religious sites. The Western powers devoted years to negotiations over the province’s future, culminating in UN-led talks under Martti Ahtisaari, a former Finnish president. Only when these failed, again thanks mainly to Russian intransigence, did Kosovo’s unilateral independence become inevitable.

Russia has nakedly pursued its own interests in the Caucasus. It did its utmost to provoke Mr Saakashvili into a fight. Its “peacekeepers” have made no pretence of protecting minorities in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The difference between Kosovo and South Ossetia has been starker still in the war’s aftermath.

The Russians invaded Georgia in a fever of war enthusiasm; have refused to pull out and rejected attempts to internationalise the dispute; and have now recognised the enclaves’ independence less than three weeks after the war began.

bringing in the UN and international peacekeepers.