Russia's Distracted Peacemaker

By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON

Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott could see a glimmer of progress. Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former Russian Prime Minister whom Boris Yeltsin has appointed as his Kosovo envoy, was inching last Wednesday night toward compromise. Chernomyrdin had signed off on a sketch of what postwar Kosovo's government might look like, and, nearby, a Russian general had spread out a map with lines drawn showing how armed peacekeepers might be deployed. Peace, Talbott hoped, was closer. But then a note was passed into the Kremlin meeting. Yeltsin had just sacked his Prime Minister, Yevgeni Primakov. Chernomyrdin--whom Yeltsin had fired as Prime Minister in 1998--was electric. Primakov had been considered a leading candidate for the presidency of Russia in 2000--a job Chernomyrdin had also been eyeing. Once Talbott learned the note's contents, he suggested a break. He could see that Chernomyrdin had become too distracted to focus on line drawings on a Kosovo map.

Whether Chernomyrdin, Yeltsin or anyone else in the Russian government could refocus was the question now confronting Washington. For five weeks Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has pinned her peace hopes on what she called a "double-magnet" strategy: pulling Russia toward NATO's demands so that it, in turn, would tug Belgrade. But Administration aides were worried that in the current chaos, nobody under Yeltsin "would be left to cut the deal," as one put it.

Chernomyrdin is fighting battles of his own. The Russian is irritated with Milosevic's and Clinton's intransigence. His aides say Chernomyrdin has formed a picture of Milosevic as a complex leader split between two desires: to save face and to save his own skin. As the air war intensifies, Chernomyrdin aides say, Milosevic has started sleeping in a different bed every night and swapping cell phones for fear NATO will use them to pinpoint him for an air strike.

But time--and those air strikes Milosevic is running away from--may be working perversely to soften NATO's resolve. With the alliance flying more than 200 sorties a day, the rate of collateral damage is growing. Serbia's state-controlled media claimed last week that another errant bomb killed more than 60 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, making some allies more nervous about civilian casualties. Germany's Green Party, part of the government's ruling coalition, broke ranks and called for a "limited halt" to the bombing. To placate U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has been pressing for another independent broker in the peace talks, Albright enlisted Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari to possibly join Chernomyrdin's shuttle.

The White House, meanwhile, detected more serious peace feelers from Belgrade. Milosevic made a public show of removing soldiers from Kosovo. Prominent Serb businessmen have also begun to grouse publicly about the bombing's economic impact--a sign that Milosevic's cronyocracy may be weakening. "People [in Belgrade] are beginning to look for a way out," says a senior Clinton Administration official. Now the White House hopes Chernomyrdin can show them the door.

--By Douglas Waller/Washington. With reporting by Paul Quinn-Judge/Moscow

With reporting by PAUL QUINN-JUDGE/MOSCOW