“Should this give Russia a license to just go rearranging countries every time it feels like it?”
The precedent was set when the USA bombed the hell out of Serbia to strip Kosovo from it’s sovereign territory.
Even yet it’s not quite the same. I don’t see any signs that Crimea was putting up a civil war here, for anyone to take sides in.
“The precedent was set when the USA bombed the hell out of Serbia to strip Kosovo from its sovereign territory.”
Exactly.
USNATO intervention in Kosovo created a precedent in international law, we can see now its consequences.
US supported every secessionist group that wanted to break away from Yugoslavia, they bombed Yugoslavia into smitherness in 1999 for 80 days non-stop, to split it in two, and they declared the Yugoslav Army to be an occupier on its own territory.
The Assembly of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, approved an unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008, when foreign troops were stationned on its territory. Kosovo was soon recognized as a sovereign state, first by the United States, and then by Germany, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and others ...
The West cannot have it both ways. They can’t say that the right of Albanians to self-determination in Kosovo trumps Serbia’s right to territorial integrity, and then turn around and say that Ukraine’s right to territorial integrity trumps the right of Russians in Crimea to self-determination.