Russia said yesterday its military experts had ended a stand-off with NATO that had blocked the departure of Moscow's main Kosovo peacekeeping contingent.
"Theoretically, [the troops] can leave at any moment," a ministry spokesman said, though he added he had no information about when the order would be given to begin the airlift.
Russian peacekeepers were grounded at home over the weekend after Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, at NATO's request, denied them an air corridor.
NATO confirmed yesterday that it had resolved differences with Moscow allowing Russian peacekeepers to go to Kosovo.
"It was confirmed that, starting from July 5th . . . there's no further obstacle for the deployment of Russian peacekeepers in Kosovo," a spokesman at NATO's military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, said.
The NATO military spokesman said that under the Moscow agreement, the airport serving the Kosovo provincial capital Pristina would now be open to Kfor, the Kosovo peacekeeping force, and could receive Russian peacekeepers. An advance force of about 100 paratroops remained on standby at an air base near the central Russian city of Ivanovo.
Russia has only a few hundred troops in the Serbian province, positioned at Pristina airport which they seized unexpectedly by road from Bosnia hours before NATO rolled into Kosovo on June 12th. The latest deployment is aimed at bringing that number to 3,600.
In a separate sign of chilly relations, a US embassy official confirmed over the weekend that Moscow had expelled an American diplomat last week, although there was no indication the action was linked to Kosovo.
More than 100,000 Serbs and other non-Albanians have fled Kosovo because of the "uncontrolled" repatriation of ethnic Albanian refugees, Yugoslavia's minister for refugees said yesterday.
This was the first time Belgrade has given an official figure for the number of non-Albanian refugees who have fled Kosovo since the departure of the Yugoslav army.