President Slobodan Milosevic and other Yugoslav leaders denounced the bombing raids as "criminal air strikes". Mr Milosevic, who is also the supreme commander of the Yugoslav armed forces, had congratulated the Yugoslav air force and air defence units for "resistance to the aggression of the NATO forces", the agency reported.
He gathered the country's leaders to assess the situation in the light of the air strikes. Participants, who were not named by Tanjug, the official newsagency, said the Yugoslav army had put up "resolute resistance" to the raids and shown a "high degree of patriotism, courage and devotion".
The ultra-nationalist Serbian deputy prime minister, Mr Vojislav Seselj, called on Serbs all over the world to "hit US interests by all means". He also said President Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Chirac of France, NATO chief Mr Javier Solana, and the organisation's commander, Gen Wesley Clark, should face trial for war crimes.
"Any US, British, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Dutch soldier, wherever he is, is the enemy of the Serbian people and has to be destroyed," Mr Seselj, head of the Serbian Radical party (SRS), said.
"In this war, we have to win, there is no giving up, whining or stepping aside. This war was imposed on us . . . and our defence will last as long as their attacks. NATO is the biggest concentration of criminals known in the history of the human race."
In London, the Yugoslav ambassador to Ireland and Britain, Dr Milos Radulovic, said that NATO, "the most powerful western alliance . . . has become an offensive alliance, instead of being defensive".
"The result is that NATO in this case supports separatism in the region, and supports people practising terroristic methods in achieving their political goals."
He said the reason given was that Serbia and Yugoslavia had not been co-operating in the process of finding a solution for the Kosovo region.
"The facts are quite different. From the very beginning, Yugoslavia and Serbia especially have tried to give maximum contribution to peaceful solutions to the problem of Kosovo. We were ready to find a fair, just and lasting solution in the form of a political agreement for that region.
"But talks in Paris had not produced such an agreement - not because of the Yugoslav side, but because of other sides at the conference. So what was offered to us was fundamentally unacceptable for us."