Russia Gives Envoy Less Than Hero’s Welcome After Kosovo Agreement

Demonstrating Russia’s mixed feelings toward the Kosovo peace accord it helped negotiate, a top Foreign Ministry official criticized the country’s own mediator Friday for not securing an immediate halt to the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

“We should have done everything to stop the bombing yesterday or today,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Avdeyev. “It didn’t happen. And NATO has this unclear provision that allows it to take several days more and not stop the bombing.”

Russian envoy Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who helped persuade Yugoslavia to accept the peace pact, was labeled a hero by one U.S. official but received no grand welcome upon his return home from Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.

Instead, Russian newspapers criticized Chernomyrdin for selling out Yugoslavia, a longtime ally, by negotiating a deal that gave the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nearly everything it wanted. President Boris N. Yeltsin, who had enlisted Chernomyrdin in the peacemaking effort, said nothing at all.

“Russia has lost more than it gained from yesterday’s developments in Belgrade,” said the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta. “Belgrade has finally given its consent to a plan that was brought by the Russian envoy but had in fact been drafted by NATO.”

Ten weeks of NATO bombing raids on Yugoslavia have embittered many Russians longing for the days when their country was a superpower that could keep NATO in its place--not a destitute nation that depends on food donated by the U.S.

Although some Western officials thought that Russian involvement in the peace negotiations would enhance the country’s self-esteem, the outcome seems instead to have highlighted Russia’s lost influence.

For many Russians, the alliance’s war on Yugoslavia has undermined faith in Western democracy, giving the Communist Party plenty of ammunition to take into December’s parliamentary elections.

“The bombing of Kosovo seriously reduces the pro-democracy electorate,” warned Konstantin Titov, governor of Russia’s Samara region. “Clinton and the entire North Atlantic alliance may well win the war in Kosovo and get control of Kosovo, but they will also put the Communists back in control of Russia.”

The outcome of the negotiations appears unlikely to help the political career of Chernomyrdin, who served as prime minister under Yeltsin longer than anyone else and had hoped for a boost in his campaign to succeed Yeltsin as president next year.

Suddenly finding himself on the defensive after laboring for weeks at the negotiating table, Chernomyrdin told reporters that NATO couldn’t have reached an agreement without help from Russia--unless the bombing continued for months more.

Distancing himself from his fellow negotiators, Chernomyrdin canceled plans Friday to travel to Helsinki, the capital of Finland, to meet again with Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott.

“You know, I don’t take part in celebrations on such occasions, to be quite frank,” he said. “No questions of substance are being discussed there.”

Newly appointed Prime Minister Sergei V. Stepashin told Vice President Al Gore in a telephone conversation that Russia stands behind the agreement but emphasized that this support was brought about only by a desire to end the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Yugoslavia.

Defending Chernomyrdin in a televised interview, the prime minister said criticism at home of Russia’s role in the settlement was motivated by politics.

“There is an attempt to prove that our position is not taken into consideration, that we have slipped somewhere, that we have lost some of our prestige,” he said. “This is true. But we should have thought about it a bit earlier.”

Stepashin said it was necessary for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to give in to NATO to prevent more deaths and the further destruction of his country.

“People are dying out there,” the prime minister said. “An entire state is being destroyed. Those who so easily criticize Chernomyrdin or Ahtisaari should go there and see the destroyed Belgrade without water, light and gas. Now it is important to stop the war, to halt the bombing.”

The Duma, the Communist-dominated lower house of parliament, met in a closed session Friday to discuss the agreement and hear from Deputy Foreign Minister Avdeyev and other officials.

After the meeting, lawmaker Sergei V. Ivanenko told reporters, “According to these people [Foreign Ministry officials], the special envoy didn’t handle the talks very successfully and made a number of concessions that were not called for by the situation.”

The Communist Party was the most critical, charging that Chernomyrdin was serving NATO, not Russia.

“The State Duma must sort out the situation and answer the question why the person who was named special envoy pushed through the main ideas which NATO dictates in the form of an ultimatum,” said Communist Party faction leader Gennady A. Zyuganov.

The Russian military also is unhappy with the agreement, said outspoken Gen. Leonid G. Ivashov, who accompanied Chernomyrdin on his latest trip to Belgrade. The general said the pullout of Yugoslav troops under the pact would allow ethnic Albanian guerrillas to enter Kosovo--a southern province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic--unhindered.

He also warned that Russia will be forced to give NATO authority over the 5,000 to 10,000 troops it plans to dispatch to Kosovo to help implement the agreement.

“When Russia sends the peacekeeping contingent to Kosovo, it must sign a special treaty with NATO concerning the conditions of its deployment there,” the general said. “It means we depend on NATO’s will.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the loudest praise for Russia’s beleaguered mediator came from the U.S. representative at the peace talks, the State Department’s Talbott.

“The process of peaceful settlement is not over yet, but it already has its heroes,” Talbott told reporters in Helsinki. “They are Martti Ahtisaari and Viktor Chernomyrdin.”