Word: chernomyrdin
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...Monday, Chernomyrdin surprised the State Department. Tired of having each plan rejected by Milosevic or Clinton, he wanted to go to Belgrade with a final take-it-or-leave-it document, every word of which he and Ahtisaari would agree on. The Russian shocked Washington again in the first hour of talks Tuesday with Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. Chernomyrdin announced Moscow acceded to the removal of all Serbian troops. Then he proposed a style change: instead of referring generally to NATO's demands, the document should spell out everything in full, including footnotes specifying the mechanics of withdrawal...
Deciding on these kinds of details took hours. Talbott, Chernomyrdin and Ahtisaari haggled on through the night over two other issues--how fast the Serbs had to leave and how central NATO would be to the peacekeeping force. Washington held out for a swift timetable, and "Strobe just hammered to make sure the document had NATO at the core," says a senior U.S. official. When the exhausted diplomats reconvened Wednesday morning, Ahtisaari threatened to pull out if there was no agreement, and Chernomyrdin conceded. Now Moscow had sided with NATO, leaving Milosevic isolated...
Compared with that marathon, the talks in Belgrade were swift and matter-of-fact. On Wednesday night the envoys and Milosevic talked for 4 1/2 hours. Chernomyrdin never veered as he read from the prepared script. Ahtisaari went over it in detail, explaining why each demand was not negotiable. "Can we make improvements in the text?" Milosevic asked. "Absolutely not," Ahtisaari shot back. This was NATO's best offer, and not a comma could be changed. Hoping to soften the Finn, Milosevic invited him to dinner. "Let's not have dinner," answered Ahtisaari. Instead, the Serbian leader should go back...
...moves into the U.N. Security Council. Washington feels heartened that it managed to draw an angry Russia back to NATO's side. Moscow, says a senior French official, "made a difficult and courageous choice" in choosing pragmatic cooperation with the West over emotional solidarity with Serbia. Though Chernomyrdin is reviled at home for kowtowing to the West, Russian diplomacy gained considerable credibility in allied capitals, where officials hope the process will strengthen wavering ties. But there is still a lot of fence mending to be done. Russians in the policy elite and on the street now regard the alliance...
...people last week were as anxious as Al Gore about the peace initiative of Russia's Viktor Chernomyrdin and Finland's Martti Ahtisaari. As the Vice President campaigned in New Hampshire, the topic of the day was to have been health care for the elderly, but at every stop Gore met questions about the peace plan that had just been accepted by the Yugoslav parliament. Gore maintained a cautious face publicly, warning that it was premature to claim victory. Still, several times in private he dashed to a secure phone line to get the latest, increasingly optimistic assessments from...