>Isn’t it interesting how things are always ‘complicated’ when it involves enemies of the empire but never when it involves nato-countries.

All of these stories are complicated, because they involve two competing rights, the right of peoples to self-determination competing against the right to territorial integrity. Ideally, both would be satisfied. The details matter and they vary.

You mention Catalonia. The Catalan and Spanish parliaments negotiated how to align these two rights and reached an agreement satisfactory to both parliaments, an agreement the involved a higher level of autonomy for Catalonia. The Constitutional Court of Spain found this to be counter to the constitution. Instead of amending the Constitution, the right-wing government of the time pushed for conflict. If not for the right-wingers, this would have been solved. I have never said this was OK. What would be right would be to honour the agreement between the parliaments.

With Tibet, it was just a land grab by China with elements of genocide. Just as they are doing genocide on the Uyghurs.

Crimea was also a land grab, there was no serious attempt to negotiate an agreement, the referendums were complete sham and unrecognised by observers. In fact, Russia used its power in the Security Council to veto any attempt by the international community to protect minorities or mediate an agreement because Russia always wanted to grab that land.

With Kosovo, instead of negotiating as Spain and Catalonia initially did and granting more autonomy, Serbia took away the autonomy Kosovo already had. Furthermore, other peoples in Yugoslavia used their right to self-determination, but Serbia denied that right to Kosovars. Serb leaders publicly proclaimed that Serbia wins in war and loses in negotiations and decided to use force, sure in the power of the Yugoslav army. They miscalculated, just as Putin has miscalculated. By deciding to use force instead of negotiation, they caused the right to self-determination to trump the right to territorial integrity.

Civilised nations, such as Czechs and Slovaks did it all peacefully, joined the EU and no harm done to anyone. Life proceeds normally between Czechs and Slovaks. Serbia, China and Russia are violent and insist on resolving these matters using force. That is the key difference. These countries think themselves powerful and that they can have attached slave-nations. Serbia failed immediately. Russia failed in Ukraine and China will also fail eventually.