The Kosovo objection is John Kiriakou’s standing criticism of the 1999 NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, formed while he was posted to the American embassy in Athens and stated at length in July 2025.
Serving in Athens during the bombing
The posting made the campaign personal in a way it was not for other American diplomats. It was “absolutely miserable not just to be an American diplomat in Greece, but to be an Orthodox Christian American diplomat while the United States government was bombing an Orthodox Christian country that the Greeks considered to be brothers.”[1][2]
The pressure reached his own family: an uncle attacked him verbally at a dinner over the destruction of the Yugo plant, and Kiriakou “could barely respond to him.” His answer, that the factory had been converted to manufacture tanks, was true — and he gave it while adding that “the bombing of Yugoslavia was wrong, wrong, wrong in the first place.”[2][3]
What he says was created
Kiriakou’s objection is not confined to the bombing. “We created this fake rump country called Kosovo that has never otherwise existed through the course of human history” — and did so, he says, on ground that “just so happens to be holy ground for the Serbian Orthodox Church” and where most of its monasteries stand.[3][4]
He renders the American position as he heard it: “Yeah, tough luck. We’re going to take this land away from you. We’re going to give it to these Muslims that you’ve been feuding with for the last 1500 years. And there’s nothing you can do about it. Oh, and by the way, we’re going to bomb you, too, just for the hell of it.”[4]
Pressed on the humanitarian justification, he concedes the premise — “that is what it was for” — and objects to what followed instead. The intervention was supposed to create a safety zone; “nobody ever said anything about it being an independent country five minutes later.”[5]
The Yeltsin question
What he says he could not explain then and cannot explain now is the exclusion of Russia. He had access to the reporting at the time, “but it just — there was no information. Why did we not work with Boris Yeltsin to figure this out? Why were we at odds with the Russians over this?”[5][6]
He treats the episode as one of the injuries at the root of the relationship, agreeing that “we installed Yeltsin” and concluding that “the Russians will never forgive us.”[6]
The embassy under siege
The consequences reached the embassy compound. Every year the mission is vacated on 17 November for the march commemorating the uprising against the junta the United States installed, which proceeds from the polytechnic to the American embassy; staff are sent home at noon. In 1999 the demonstrations were so large that “we evacuated the American embassy at least a dozen times that year.”[6][7]
The crowds arrived armed with the coinage of the pre-euro drachma. Protesters flung hundred-drachma coins — about the size of an Eisenhower silver dollar, worth roughly 27 cents, and heavy enough to throw — through the windows on the front of the building, then filled balloons with red paint and launched them at the facade with slingshots. “The next day the embassy is just peppered with red paint splotches and the windows are all broken.”[8][9]