President Slobodan Milosevic yesterday urged Russia to provide military aid to help Belgrade defend itself against NATO air attacks. There was only a cautious response from Moscow.
Mr Milosevic said arms from Belgrade's eastern ally could make it easier to withstand the aerial bombardment that the Atlantic alliance has carried out for nine days over Yugoslavia.
"We will defend our country," Milosevic told a team of visiting deputies from the Russian and Belarus parliaments, according to the official Tanjug news agency. "If we have help, it will be easier to defend it, if we do not have it, we will defend it with more difficulty, but we will defend it for sure," he said.
Yugoslav Defence Minister Pavle Bulatovic made a similar, if not firmer request, saying Belgrade was expecting "arms and military equipment" to be delivered quickly. In return, Bulatovic said Belgrade was prepared to give Russia the remains of the US F117 Stealth warplane shot down in northern Serbia last Saturday. Interfax news agency quoted military sources as saying parts of the fighter had already been flown to Russia.
In Moscow, Russia's chief of staff, Gen Anatoly Kvashnin, refused to rule out shipping in military supplies for its historical ally, but said the situation did not yet warrant direct intervention.
But as the spy ship Liman (Lagoon) made its way to the Adriatic, Russian newspapers were claiming that military co-operation between Russia and Yugoslavia was in progress. The business newspaper Kommersant wrote that Moscow was supplying military intelligence to Belgrade while the daily Izvestia claimed Russia would send anti-terrorist experts and special service soldiers to Yugoslavia in the event of a NATO invasion. A defence-ministry spokesman, however, described both reports as "science fiction".
An opinion poll published yesterday showed that 90 per cent of Russians opposed NATO's act ions in Yugoslavia. One TV commentator described NATO as imposing the will of 17 per cent of the world's population on the rest of the planet. Former Soviet President Mr Mikahil Gorbachev said he felt "betrayed by the west."
Russia's media has adopted a totally different attitude to the Kosovo crisis than that of its western counterparts. There has been little emphasis on the flow of ethnic-Albanian refugees and viewers have been treated to reports which show the west in general and NATO in particular in a very bad light.
Russia's call for a meeting of the G-8 group of nations has been rejected. The appeal by the elected representative of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians, Mr Ibrahim Rugova, for NATO to stop its campaign has been ignored and even the Vatican's call for a ceasefire on Easter Sunday has met with a negative response from NATO.
These are the reports which gain the greatest prominence in the newspapers and television in Moscow with strong questioning of the legality of NATO action without the backing of the Security Council of the United Nations.
