The New York Times

Monday, June 14, 1999

MOSCOW

Envoys Haggle Over Russian Role in Peacekeeping Force

By MICHAEL WINES

MOSCOW -- The chief negotiators for Russia and NATO haggled for a fourth day to no avail Sunday over how and where Russian troops would serve in a Kosovo peacekeeping operation.

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and Russia's foreign minister, Ivan Ivanov, met for only about two hours before the talks broke up. Talbott said he was hopeful that the two sides could make progress. President Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin also discussed the peacekeeping issue by telephone Sunday afternoon, but agreed only to talk again.

Despite some suggestions of progress, it was apparent that the Russians' murky decision two days ago to send 200 troops to Kosovo and occupy the airfield NATO had marked as its headquarters had soured the atmosphere surrounding the peacekeeping operation.

NATO officials reacted with exaggerated courtesy to the Russian occupation, even after the Russian troops used armored personnel carriers to block a convoy of 15 French army vehicles from entering the airfield.

In Brussels, the alliance's spokesman, Jamie Shea, insisted that there was "nothing confrontational" about the Russians' behavior and that, indeed, NATO never really had its heart set on the airport at all.

Shea said the airfield had been the initial choice of the field commander in Kosovo, Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, but that officials were looking at other options.

The puzzling question of who ordered Russian troops to leave their posts in Bosnia and rush to Kosovo still lacked a compelling answer Sunday, even as various officials said Yeltsin had approved of it.

Ivanov, who went on American television Saturday morning to call the deployment a mistake, admitted Sunday that nobody had told him that it had been approved beforehand at high levels, even though he is the Kremlin's chief negotiator on the structure of the peacekeeping force.

Ivanov said he was not disturbed by the omission, in part because a couple hours' delay in notification was not all that important in his job.

In Moscow Sunday, a parade of officials insisted that Russia's occupation of the airport was a defensive move to keep NATO from assuming complete control of what is supposed to be a U.N. operation.

Who ultimately commands the force is a major area of contention between the two sides, as NATO insists that the force operate under its command and Moscow demands control by the United Nations.

An unidentified senior Russian military official told the Interfax news service that the occupation of the airport gave Russia a bargaining chip in negotiations, in which Russia had been placed in "a humiliating, subordinate position and under NATO control."

Vladimir Lukin, the chairman of the international affairs committee in Russia's lower house of parliament, called the rush to the airport "an attempt in a quite dramatic and bold form to demonstrate that there is the U.N. and understandings that have to be fulfilled."

The negotiations in Moscow Sunday between Talbott and Ivanov failed to make headway on the issue of command of the peacekeeping force. But Talbott seemed to hint at compromise on the second crucial issue, whether Russian troops should serve throughout Kosovo or be confined to one sector.

The Russians, who see their role as a protector of the region's Serbs, want a Serbian-populated sector. NATO has refused, saying it would amount to a partition of Kosovo.

Talbott straddled the two sides Sunday, saying Russia would have an "important and manifest" role in parts of Kosovo. "I don't think there is any question that Russia should have an area in which its responsibility is manifest, evident for all the world to see," he said.

In London and in Washington, senior government officials floated essentially the same proposal. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry Shelton, said on CNN that a "zone of responsibility" could be arranged for Russia. And the British foreign secretary, Robin Cook, said each nation's troops would have a zone of responsibility, including Russia. No one was saying yet how or whether a zone differed from a sector.