ifteen years ago this week, I broke a promise I'd given to myself: After being captured and threatened with execution by Kosovar guerrillas the year before, I had sworn to give up war reporting. Now I was on my way to Belgrade to report on the effects the NATO bombing campaign was having on Serbia. When friends challenged my decision, I explained that I thought the course of history was changing at that very moment and I had to document it.
I was wrong about the documenting-it part: I stayed in the region for six weeks, writing a number of stories, including 34 separate dispatches for Slate from Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia, but it took a lot longer than that for the catastrophic historic change to become evident. It has taken 15 years. Russia's invasion of Ukraine completes that story.
