Brussels, Jan 17 (Prensa Latina) The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has removed from its official website the historic document justifying its 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia's power grid, the newspaper Le Soir reported.

The document, a question-and-answer exchange with then-spokesperson Jamie Shea, defended the attacks by arguing that the electricity powered military systems.

“If President (Slobodan) Milosevic wants water and electricity for the population, he must accept NATO’s five conditions,” Shea stated in May 1999, according to the transcript.

Local analysts interpret the removal of the document as an attempt to rewrite the historical narrative, amid current criticism of Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, and emphasize that bombing essential civilian infrastructure constitutes a violation of the Geneva Conventions, regardless of the conflict.

This action by the Atlantic alliance sets a controversial precedent regarding the use of attacks on critical infrastructure as a method of coercion during conflicts.

The military bloc began bombing Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999, under the pretext of alleged ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.

VNATO’s attacks, carried out without UN authorization, left more than 2,500 dead in the former Yugoslavia, including 87 children, and caused an estimated $100 billion in infrastructure damage.

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