Major powers expressed unease yesterday about the sincerity of the promise of the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, to ease repression in Kosovo and restart stalled talks on autonomy.
Amid reports of fresh fighting, and allegations that Yugoslav border guards shot dead an Albanian inside Albania, leaders of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority said Mr Milosevic was simply playing for time and rejected fresh negotiations.
Following talks in Moscow with President Boris Yeltsin of Russia, the NATO allies welcomed signs that Mr Milosevic was "beginning to bend" to international pressure. But they noted he had not met one of their key demands to withdraw troops and said there would be no slowing allied planning for possible armed intervention.
Separatist fighters of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) told of renewed attacks on their positions by Serbian forces overnight, with at least one guerrilla said to have been killed.
At least 10 people have been killed or wounded in the past few days in Kosovo, where the death toll is now more than 300 and about 65,000 people have been forced to flee their homes. Any decision to launch NATO air strikes to end the Kosovo conflict would have to take into account the destruction of air defences all over the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, security experts said.
Yugoslavia's forces have 60 mobile surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems with SA-12 Soviet-designed missiles, plus 241 combat aircraft and plenty of old-fashioned but effective anti-aircraft cannon, a military expert said.
"It's a different order of magnitude from Bosnia," he told Reuters, referring to the August 1995 NATO air strikes at Bosnian Serb targets which effectively ended the 1992-1995 war.
The Bosnian Serb Army had little in the way of air defence systems and very few aircraft, but NATO still lost three warplanes including a British Harrier, a French Jaguar and a US F-16.