Vladimir Putin‘s creeping assault on Ukraine continues. With a quick strike invasion, Russian conventional and special operations forces bit off Crimea, annexed it and then waited. This week, ethnic Russian agitators in eastern Ukraine marched on camera, building barricades and demanding political unification with Mother Russia. One group in Donetsk demanded the Kremlin send “temporary” peacekeeping troops.

We’ve seen this script before, in another Slav-versus-Slav war featuring calculated, creeping aggression in pursuit of coveted territory. Serbia’s loathsome dictator, Slobodan Milosevic — who at the time still called himself the leader of Yugoslavia — used the same “creeping” operational technique in 1991 when Serbia attacked Croatia in the opening rounds of Yugoslavia’s war of dissolution.