News reports from Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities under unrelenting bombardment by the Russian Army have been triggering painful memories among the survivors of the 1990s siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

And yet, many have been spending hours on end glued to their TV screens since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine late last month.

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“Not so long ago, we were them,” said Amra Muftic who survived the 1992-95 siege, watching news reports showing civilians taking refuge from Russian rocket attacks, shelling and gunfire in basements and metro stations.

“If our experience is anything to go by — and I have a gut feeling that it is — things are about to get much worse,” for them, she added.

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Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo in the early 1990s, during the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia. Some 350,000 people were trapped, for 46 months, in their multiethnic city, subjected to daily shelling and sniper attacks and cut off from regular access to electricity, food, water, medicine, and the outside world.

More than 11,000 people were killed during the siege, including over 1,000 children. Countless others were wounded.

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“We know how they feel. We survived the longest siege in modern history” said Elma Vukotic, an anesthesiologist, as she and her fellow healthcare workers stood earlier this week outside their Sarajevo hospital, clad in their medical robes and holding balloons in the blue and yellow colours of the Ukrainian flat — and, coincidentally, also the Bosnian one. Vukotic said their spontaneous show of solidarity was the least they could do for their Ukrainian colleagues.

“All wars are painful, all attacks against civilians abhorrent, but what is happening to Ukrainians right now is especially traumatic for us because they are so near and in a situation very similar to ours” three decades ago, Vukotic said.

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“Television images of pregnant women waiting to give birth in the basement of the Kyiv hospital, hastily converted into an emergency bomb shelter, gave me a strong sense of deja vu; I know exactly how they feel, how terrified they must be,” she added. “Also, I think we all can empathize with how unwilling ordinary Ukrainians were to accept that the war was coming until Russian rockets and bombs started raining down on their homes, schools and hospitals.”

The Bosnian war started when Bosnian Serbs, with the help of the Yugoslav army, tried to create ethnically pure territories with the aim of joining neighbouring Serbia. More than 100,000 people were killed and 2 million — more than a half of the country’s population — were left homeless during the conflict.