Word: russian
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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...
...Moscow not only insisted on participating in the peace force but tried to place its troops in charge of Kosovo's northern quadrant, where many Serbian holy sites lie. Washington refused for fear that would effectively partition the province. Now the diplomats are wrangling over just what role the Russian troops will play and who will command them. Russia's proud military men oppose the settlement, making it harder for Moscow's troops to be tucked comfortably under NATO's "unified" command...
...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...
...worst-case scenario, failure to reach agreement with Russia creates the possibility of a Berlin 1945-style partition of Kosovo, Moscow?s gambit could also be designed for domestic consumption in Russia and Yugoslavia, emphasizing that Kosovo hasn?t been surrendered to NATO. So don?t expect Western and Russian forces to square off in a Cold War replay. Like the space race, the rush to get to Kosovo may be more about planting a flag...