NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia could end tomorrow, with an international peacekeeping force entering Kosovo by the end of the week, following yesterday's agreement between the leading western nations and Russia on a draft UN Security Council resolution on the conflict.
Meanwhile NATO sources said B-52 bombers caught two Yugoslav army battalions in the open on the slopes of Mount Pastrik, western Kosovo yesterday and many hundreds of troops may have been killed. The sources in Brussels said two battalions of 400 to 600 soldiers each were fired on.
Confirming the hit the pentagon spokesman said: " It's very difficult for us to know about numbers of people injured or killed." No official NATO comment was made and the report was not confirmed by Belgrade.
As the security council met at United Nations headquarters in New York, talks between NATO commanders and their Yugoslav counterparts resumed at the Macedonian border with Kosovo after a two-day interruption.
Foreign Ministers from the Group of Eight, made up of the seven leading industrialised countries and Russia, agreed the draft resolution at the end of two days of talks in Bonn and Cologne. The agreement calls for a withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo and authorises the deployment of an international peacekeeping force in the province.
The British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, told the House of Commons that, once the military/technical talks in Macedonia are completed, the agreement could be implemented within days.
"Providing the Serbs, at long last, honour their undertakings and begin a verifiable withdrawal of their forces, the NATO bombing can be suspended, the Security Council resolution passed and the international force can deploy into Kosovo by the end of this week," he said.
The draft resolution does not mention NATO but an appendix makes clear that the western alliance will make up a "substantial" part of the 50,000 strong force. Russia said yesterday that it would provide 10,000 troops and a further 5,000 will come from other non-NATO states, possibly including Ireland.
The US Deputy Secretary of State, Mr Strobe Talbott, will fly to Moscow today to hammer out details of the relationship between Russian forces and NATO in the peacekeeping force.
Russia insists that its soldiers will not serve under NATO command but the US hopes that Moscow will agree to a similar arrangement to SFOR, the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia.
The US Secretary of State, Mrs Madeleine Albright, said that, although Kosovo would be divided into sectors dominated by troops from particular nations, there would be no exclusively Russian zone. The UN Security Council discussed the draft resolution for 75 minutes last night and is expected to meet again today but Russia and China are adamant that no resolution will be passed until NATO's bombing campaign ends. Western diplomats were confident last night that China will support the resolution but they conceded that co-ordinating the next sequence of events in the peace process could be difficult.
Mrs Albright called on Yugoslavia to agree to a withdrawal plan as soon as possible and allow the international peacekeepers to get on with the job of making Kosovo safe enough for its ethnic Albanian refugees to return home.
"The regime in Belgrade should stop shilly-shallying around. Each day of denial leads only to another day of destruction and another day of delay," she said.
If the talks between NATO and Yugoslav generals in Macedonia are successful, Yugoslav forces could begin their withdrawal from Kosovo tomorrow morning. Once NATO is satisfied that the withdrawal has started, it will suspend its bombing campaign. While the diplomatic activity proceeded yesterday, NATO continued to bomb Yugoslavia.
--(Additional reporting by Reuters)
