Word: chernomyrdin
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...personal survival is your war aim, then surrender is always an option. We will never know exactly when the decision took root in the contrarian lobes of Slobodan Milosevic's brain. But three weeks ago, his body language changed. For weeks, whenever he received Russian special envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Serbian leader would loll arrogantly back in his seat and hold forth, filling the room with his self-serving discourse. Since launching a diplomatic shuttle on April 14, Chernomyrdin had spent dozens of fruitless hours with Milosevic, most of them listening. Then on May 19, the Russian detected a subtle...
...denouement was accelerated by inspired diplomacy that paired the sympathetic Russian Chernomyrdin with the neutral Finnish President, Martti Ahtisaari. Chernomyrdin had had no luck penetrating the complex, impulsive, stubborn character of the Serbian leader. But he concluded that you could, eventually, do a deal with Milosevic if you could help him save face. Early in May, at breakfast with Vice President Al Gore and Albright, Chernomyrdin suggested he needed a negotiating partner with stature in Europe but no connections to NATO. "If I have someone from the West with me, I have a better chance of getting this done...
Ahtisaari was a welcome addition to the team soon nicknamed "hammer and anvil" in State Department circles. Chernomyrdin didn't much cotton to his uncompromising American interlocutors, and he shared the general Russian suspicion that NATO leaders, particularly Clinton, were driven less by concern for Kosovars than by the desire to show the rest of the world who is boss. Washington worried that Chernomyrdin was soft-pedaling NATO's demands in Belgrade, and wasn't sure he relayed back an accurate reading of Milosevic's intentions...
...toughest negotiations over the peace plan took place between the U.S. and Russia, quarreling over ways to bring the war to an end. But Milosevic's change in body language encouraged Chernomyrdin to plan another trip to Belgrade last week, even with no hope of a bombing pause. Washington wanted Ahtisaari to go along, figuring he could clearly convey NATO's demands, while the Russian followed his own script, fudging on two that Moscow opposed: all Serbian forces must be withdrawn and NATO had to form the core of the peacekeeping force...
...partners -- chief Javier Solana insisted on "Fox News Sunday," that "there will be one commander" of the postwar force -- and the Russians aren't looking to take any more orders from the West. "Under our law and under our morality," said former prime minister and current peace broker Viktor Chernomyrdin on Sunday, "we will never be under NATO." Right now, as Milosevic seems finally to have admitted, there's no other place...