I am a Serb whose some family members were staff officers involved in organizing and planning the whole thing, operational officers who oversaw military bases and overseeing the fronts, and finally tactical officers who were on the lines themselves overseeing men carrying out things in the field in the most minute detail, repairing trucks, digging out machinegun emplacements, etc.
Basically, all of these countries sprouting like mushrooms after the rain around Serbia, cant find em on a map in 18th century, cant find em on a map in the 19th century, cant find them on the fucking map in the 20th century.
Serb bled to liberate those territories. Those territories were all Austrian first, and then became Serbian by blood. We were bleeding on them to liberate them, and Serbia became regional power. Serbia (Yugoslavia, 90% of everything important about Yugoslavia was Serbian and done by Serbs) was in that time producing submarines, something less than 10 countries in the world could do. We also had plans to develop a native jet program in cooperation with both the Soviets and NATO, a native Serb flavor of MiG or something like an F16 but waaaaay back when few countries had jets, adapted for Serbian geography, climate and enemies. Serbia was also producing whole tanks, something no ex-yu country can do, TODAY, we used to do ~100 years ago.
Basically, Yugoslavia was becoming too powerful. And neutral. Moscow just collapsed (90s). Beijing is still a backwater who cant assist. Washington decides to quash this emerging center of power, without consequences. Serbia/Yugoslavia is no longer a regional player, with pretensions to become a world player.
NATO found a local shoe factory with a flag (aka Slovenia) and turned it into a "sovereign nation" where NATO ambassadors write all the laws, local ice cream factory with a flag (aka Croatia) etc etc.
Slobodan was cowardly leader who wanted to bring foreign world to negotiating table, so he held Serb armies back, not a single Serbian soldier even crossed any borders or killed a single civilian. Sloba (nickname further on, shorter to write) just sent Serb untrained and unorganized civilians few boxes of AKs and that was kinda it.
Real war was Serb anti air vs NATO air. That's it. Civil wars were just a bunch of armed civies where Serbs were winning while being outnumbered.
NATO won, we scrapped their 150 billion dollars "state of the art" stealth program tho if nothing else, but that was it. Serbia is removed from the world stage. Serbian provinces turned into utterly irrelevant banana republics governed by NATO ambassadors, Serbia itself encircled, without sea access, and bombarded into stone ages, all factories destroyed, everything completely destroyed.