78 Days of Fear: Remembering NATO’s Bombing of Yugoslavia

The army statement said that over 20 buildings had already been hit and that the air campaign was continuing, but insisted that the military's operational and combat readiness was at the highest possible level. It also declared that the mood among the country's soldiers and officers was "unusually high".

The news continued with a press release from the man who was Serbia's information minister at the time, and who is now the country's president, Aleksandar Vucic.

"The evil, terrible, subversive, cowardly attack by the NATO army on Serbia and Yugoslavia is proof of the neo-Nazi policies of the USA and its satellites. Serbia will defend itself against the aggressor and will defeat the enemy," Vucic was quoted as saying by RTS.

NATO launched its air campaign against Yugoslavia in an attempt to force President Milosevic to accept the terms of an agreement to end his military campaign against the Kosovo Liberation Army, which involved widespread ethnic cleansing and killings of Kosovo Albanian civilians.

The peace deal had been discussed for most of the previous month at the Chateau de Rambouillet, near Paris in France. The international pressure that led to the talks was triggered by a massacre in January 1999, when Serbian forces killed 44 ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo village of Recak/Racak.

The Kosovo delegation, led by the Kosovo Liberation Army's political director Hashim Thaci - who is now Kosovo's president - accepted the terms of the proposed agreement, which offered the chance to the violence and gave Kosovo Albanians substantial autonomy, although preserving Yugoslav sovereignty over the territory.

Avni Zogiani, who was a journalist for Kosovo newspaper Koha Ditore at the time, said that because the situation on...