The war which Russia is waging against Ukraine is a kind of replay of the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, and lies disseminated by Moscow resemble the Serbian propaganda, Christiane Amanpour, a CNN editor and political reporter, said in Sarajevo on Saturday.

Amanpour, who began her career as a CNN correspondent in Sarajevo during the war, arrived now in the Bosnian capital city for the Sarajevo Film Festival which was on Friday ushered by the premiere of the Kiss The Future, a documentary by US-based Croatian director Nenad Cicin-Sain.

The film is based on a story of how U2’s 1997 concert in Sarajevo, which, as one of the participants in the project said, symbolically marked the end of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

One of the protagonists of the documentary is Amanpour, who said at a news conference in Sarajevo today that as a young reporter she had to learn how to report about the events in Bosnia and to show to the international community that this was not just a civil was and to show who was the aggressor and who was the victim.

I had to be sincere as the international community had wanted to put an equal sign between the parties and wanted to be ‘neutral’, said this British-Iranian journalist and television host.

In the context of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she warned that these lessons must not be forgotten.

The Russians are trying to do the same thing to the democracy and culture which they want to erase, Amanpour said during her talks with the press and audience in Sarajevo.

She said that in Bosnia and Herzegovina she had faced for the first time the phenomenon of fake news and propaganda conducted by the Serbian side.

It is the same thing which the Russians are doing now, while imposing the false narrative about the war which they are waging about Ukraine, she explained.

The film’s director Cicin-Sain said that it was very emotional for him to have the premiere of this documentary in Sarajevo.

He also said that he would be glad to receive an invitation for the presentation of the documentary about the siege of Sarajevo in Serbia, too, as, he said, the documentary was not about the criticism of the Serb people but of the politician and nationalist Slobodan Milosevic.