NATO Soldiers Enter Kosovo in First Phase of Peace Mission

With an entrance trumpeted by helicopters swooping overhead, hundreds of camouflage NATO military vehicles streamed into Kosovo just after dawn today in the first phase of the Western alliance’s peacekeeping effort in the war-battered Serbian province.

It was a vivid display of coordinated international military might. About 5 a.m., a few lone Apache gunships circled the nearby mountains. Giant Chinook choppers followed, swinging huge Land Rovers under their bellies; one even dropped a few flares as it swept across the remote landscape.

All this took place at the same border crossing where tens of thousands of Kosovo refugees streamed into Macedonia over the past three months, many with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They told tales of atrocities at the hands of the Serbs that shook the world and prompted a NATO-led bombing campaign that lasted 78 days, before Yugoslavia capitulated and agreed to allow an international peacekeeping force to enter Kosovo under U.N. auspices.

The arrival of that force, known as KFOR, was led by the elite British 5th Airborne Brigade, whose mission it will be to clear, secure and maintain the first 7 1/2 miles of a two-lane highway into Pristina, the Kosovo capital, that is expected to become among the busiest military routes in the history of Europe.

Later today, British NATO commander Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson was set to arrive in Pristina to take charge there.

In another of the unexpected turns that have characterized the latest crisis in the Balkans, however, the NATO contingent was beaten to Pristina earlier today when an armored column of Russian soldiers rolled in to the elated cheers of Serbian crowds.

Thousands of Serbs crowded the city’s main streets to greet the Russians with shouts, whistles, fireworks and gunfire into the night sky. “Russia! Russia!” they chanted as some revelers leaped onto the Russian army vehicles and grabbed the soldiers’ hands.

In Moscow, Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov told CNN that the troops did not have the Russian government’s authorization to be there and had been ordered to leave. “Unfortunately, this did take place,” he said.

High-ranking officials of Yugoslav’s Serbian-led government were on hand for the 1:30 a.m. arrival of the Russians, apparently choreographed to precede NATO’s deployment and offset Yugoslavia’s defeat in Kosovo after 11 weeks of bombing by the Western alliance.

After bowing to NATO’s demands to withdraw its own troops from Kosovo, the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is trying to encourage Kosovo’s Serbian minority to remain in the province as NATO peacekeepers escort home hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians whom the Serbs had expelled.

Goran Matic, a Yugoslav Cabinet minister without portfolio, said the Russians were in Pristina to “build confidence” in the NATO-led peacekeeping operation.

The Russian convoy, consisting of at least 14 armored personnel carriers and as many trucks and other vehicles, settled in Kosovo Polje, about seven miles outside Pristina.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was caught by surprise Friday when the Russian peacekeepers stationed in Bosnia-Herzegovina first entered Yugoslavia and headed toward Kosovo.

The sudden troop movement came as talks in Moscow with a top U.S. diplomat on Russia’s role in the peacekeeping force broke down over the central point of disagreement: Who will command the Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo?

Russian generals have been demanding a separate zone within Kosovo under their control. NATO has strongly opposed this, fearing creation of a sector in Kosovo where Serbs might still be able to exercise authority.

“Russia’s units will not be subordinated to anybody,” Ivanov, the foreign minister, declared Friday on Russian state television.

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott left Moscow after the failed talks but turned around in midair when word of the Russian deployment reached him and resumed negotiations with Russian officials into the early morning today. Even as those fresh talks dragged on, Russian officials were assuring their American counterparts that the troops would not enter Kosovo ahead of Western peacekeepers.

The long-term intentions of the Russian soldiers who entered Pristina today weren’t clear. NATO spokesman Maj. David Scanlon said up to 200 Russian soldiers would return to Bosnia after preparing for a more permanent Russian peacekeeping contingent.

The Russians also promised U.S. officials that they would send a delegation to Macedonia to meet with NATO commander Jackson, a senior State Department official said. It was unclear when the delegation would arrive.

NATO said a “substantial” force of its own would be in Kosovo today. The British troops from Macedonia were set to be flanked by French units to the east and German troops crossing from Albania in the west.

The sudden Russian deployment is likely to make it difficult for the alliance to proceed with the Kosovo peacekeeping operation without reaching an accommodation with the Russians. Moscow has offered as many as 10,000 troops for the peacekeeping force, which is expected to number about 48,000, but has insisted that the Russians not answer to NATO. The alliance has demanded that the international peacekeeping force have a “unified command” under Jackson.

At NATO headquarters in Brussels, where final preparations for today’s deployment were underway, officials were stunned by the Russians’ gambit.

“If this is peace, bring back the airstrikes,” one harried NATO official quipped.

While the number of Russian troops was small, their movement alarmed Western officials. Fearing the Russians were beginning a race for control of the province, British rapid-deployment troops waiting on the border in Macedonia went on alert at midday Friday for possible quick deployment to Pristina. The alert was canceled five hours later when it appeared that the Russian force would not cross into the province ahead of Western peacekeepers.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was in Macedonia to visit U.S. forces attached to the peacekeeping force and to tour a refugee camp near the capital, Skopje, placed an urgent call to Ivanov, her Russian counterpart.

“He told me he understood there would be a unified command,” Albright said later, adding that Ivanov had assured her that Russian forces would not enter Kosovo before a peacekeeping command was established.

Russian officials described the surprise redeployment as “active preparations” for taking part in the Kosovo security force. They pointed out that Russian forces in Bosnia were farther away from Kosovo than allied forces and that moving an advance contingent closer to the peacekeeping zone was necessary to ensure rapid deployment.

In other developments Friday:

* President Clinton flew to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, where he was greeted by Air Force crews who had dispatched B-2 Stealth bombers to participate in the 11-week air campaign against Yugoslavia that ended Thursday. Clinton saluted the Air Force personnel “for a job well done” in the Yugoslav campaign.

* In a troubling development for the 350 to 400 reconnaissance flights that NATO plans to carry out daily to monitor compliance with this week’s agreement by Yugoslavia to remove about 40,000 troops and police from Kosovo, the alliance reported that radar from a SAM-6 surface-to-air missile battery had locked on to a Western warplane Thursday. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, commander of NATO forces in Europe, fired off a protest to the Yugoslav chief of the general staff to demand that his forces scrupulously respect the terms of the withdrawal agreement.

* A Kosovo village close to the border with Albania was on fire during the afternoon, apparently set ablaze by departing Yugoslav forces, and artillery shells continued to hit Albanian villages at midday, international observers said. Andrea Angeli, a spokesman for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Tirana, the Albanian capital, said its observers had seen the village of Gorozhup in flames during the afternoon.

In Moscow, Deputy Secretary of State Talbott had spent Thursday and Friday morning discussing the issue of Russia’s participation in the peacekeeping force with Russian officials and was heading to Brussels to brief Western officials about the failed talks when he was ordered back to the Russian capital. Earlier in the day, Russia’s chief negotiator at the talks, Col. Gen. Leonid G. Ivashov, accused NATO of planning the operation and assigning sectors of responsibility without including the Russians.

“We will not beg for a little piece” of Kosovo, Ivashov said. “If no agreement is reached, then Russia has the same rights [to set up a peacekeeping force] as NATO.” He said Russia might reach a separate agreement with Yugoslavia to deploy its peacekeepers independently in Kosovo.

It was not clear what role President Boris N. Yeltsin played in the deployment of Russian troops to Kosovo or when it had begun. Russian news reports suggested that the soldiers left their base in Bosnia about 8 a.m. Moscow time, which would mean they were already heading for the Yugoslav border before the initial Talbott talks ended without agreement.

Aboard a flight bound for Washington after her Macedonia visit, Albright told reporters late Friday that she understood the Russians had informed the international peacekeeping operation in Bosnia of their plans before leaving that Balkan nation, where a multinational force has maintained order since a 3 1/2-year war there ended in 1995.

Russian participation in the peacekeeping force was critical to selling the peace deal to Milosevic. Russians have historical and cultural ties with the Serbs.

But NATO fears that the province’s Serbs would concentrate inside a Russian sector, in effect dividing the province into ethnic regions.

“What we want to avoid most is anything that gives the impression of partition,” Albright said aboard her plane Friday.

Ivashov said NATO offered the Russians some sort of role in the U.S. sector, whose commanding officer would be a NATO general.

“We don’t need this,” he scoffed after the talks initially broke down Friday. “That is not ‘participation’ in the operation. That is some sort of incomprehensible ‘presence.’ ”

Even as the Russians were moving into Kosovo, Yugoslav forces continued their withdrawal. Hundreds of army and police tanks, armored personnel carriers, trucks, cars, buses, minivans, antiaircraft guns and field artillery pieces rolled out of the province Friday on their first full day of retreat. Scores of Serbian civilians in cars joined their convoy, leaving in fear of the province’s ethnic Albanian majority.

More than half a dozen abandoned homes burned along the withdrawal route north from Pristina. A Serbian civilian in the village of Luzani said “some lunatics” in the police were setting the fires as they left--and before ethnic Albanian owners could come home from their forced exile.

“Everything has become irrational with this withdrawal,” he said.

A few military vehicles carried away personal belongings, such as satellite dishes, kitchen appliances and carpets. It was difficult to know what was looted and what was not; some police officers said they were leaving with their families.

The soldiers looked jubilant as they headed home. They cheered and waved the Serbian three-fingered salute at passing cars. As they arrived in Serbia proper, people stood in the streets of towns and applauded. Some threw flowers.

“Long live the Yugoslav army! Death to the NATO fascists!” read a large banner stretched across the facade of city hall in Prokuplje in Serbia, about 15 miles northeast of the border of Kosovo. The crowd there laughed as an army truck passed with a large stuffed toy monkey on the hood and the letters NATO on its belly.

The retreating convoy was a startling sight. During NATO’s 11-week air campaign, about 40,000 Yugoslav soldiers and police had scattered across rural Kosovo and made themselves nearly invisible to avoid bombing by alliance warplanes. On Friday they were on full display, although a few tanks were still covered with leafy camouflage.

In Macedonia, British paratroopers and Gurkha riflemen camped along the border with Yugoslavia awaiting NATO orders to lead the alliance’s peacekeepers into Kosovo today.

About 20,000 allied troops--including 4,000 Americans--were in Macedonia awaiting orders to move.

“The idea is that there will be a threefold movement into Kosovo, the Germans from Albania, the U.K. [United Kingdom troops] up the center and the French in from the right [east],” a NATO official in Brussels said.

At the Pentagon, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles Wald said Friday that he expected some U.S. troops to accompany the British lead units to the new KFOR headquarters at Pristina; other U.S. forces will head east to the command post for the U.S. troops in Gnjilane.

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Reitman reported from Kacanik, Boudreaux from Pristina and Reynolds from Moscow. Times staff writers Tyler Marshall in Skopje, John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.