The interviewer is Kevork Almassian from Syriana Analysis, who opens the interview by saying that people have told him the West is trying to Balkanize Syria as they did to Yugoslavia. His guest is Marcus Papadopoulos, a British historian who has studied the Balkan region extensively.

Papadopoulos lays out the brutal and complicated history of the West's dismantling of "Tito's Yugoslavia" beginning in 1991 and leading up to the current clashes between Serbia and Kosovo. Some notes, including a few revelations I hadn't heard before:

• that Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić was a disciple of Tony Blair and chosen by him, that he and the rest of the Serbian government care nothing about the country or the people, they're only interested in the money, materialism and status their positions have afforded them.

• that "the largest overseas American base in the world" is located in Kosovo.

• that the West facilitated the secession of Kosovo from Serbia in the late 90s by recognizing, arming and providing intelligence to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which they had previously designated as a terrorist organization because of its involvement in drug and arms smuggling and organ trafficking. According to Papadopolous, Interpol and other police agencies around the world refer to Kosovo as the "Republic of Heroin".

• This article from The Guardian in 2000 says that Kosovo was supplying up to 40% of the heroin sold in Europe and North America; and this one from 2019 about the Kosovo prime minister's alleged involvement says, "As the Council of Europe and investigative journalists have documented, northern Albania was the site not only of KLA training camps but of secret detention centers where prisoners of war and civilian KLA opponents were executed and their organs surgically removed and sold on the international black market."

• I had previously heard that the 1999 bombing campaign NATO waged against Serbia included the use of depleted uranium, but it bears repeating. Papadopoulos said there has been a massive increase in cancer rates in Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo as a result.

• the Serbian government provided weapons via Saudi Arabia to Al Queda and ISIS in Syria.

• the interviewer said he met a Syrian man who was living in Armenia in 2014 and 2015 and doing business in Ukraine. He said he was approached by the Ukrainian embassy about smuggling arms to the "freedom fighters" in Syria.

• Papadopoulos thinks that the latest clashes and those engineered earlier this year are because the West's grip on Serbia is weak and the situation has been aggravated by the war in Ukraine because most Serbs support the Russians.

• He repeated something I've heard before, that there are strong historical ties between Serbians and Russians because of Pan- Slavism and their shared Eastern Orthodox faith. He pointed out that Russia was in no position to aid Serbia in the late 90s because they were "on their hands and knees" militarily, economically, politically and societally.

• Asked about his book, Arise, Rossiya: The Return of Russia to World Politics he said the first part is about the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which he states did not collapse, it was dissolved by "three treacherous Soviet politicians": Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk of the Ukrainian SSR and Stanislav Shushkevich of the Belarussian SSR. I don't recall hearing this before but found confirmation in this article about the death of Shushkevich, "the man who broke the news to Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union was being consigned to history..."