(Sergey Ponomarev | The New York Times) A mural of President Vladimir Putin of Russia alongside the Serbian word for “brother,” in Belgrade, Serbia, March 26, 2022. A sense of victimhood runs deep in Serbia, viewing crimes committed by ethnic kin during the Balkan wars of the 1990s as a defensive response, just as Putin presents his invasion of Ukraine as a righteous effort to protect persecuted ethnic Russians.