Air raid sirens resume after Primakov leaves

The Russian Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, met President Slobodan Milosevic yesterday for six hours in the first serious attempt to end the week-old war between NATO and Yugoslavia.

"We want to shift the process into political territory," Mr Primakov said as he emerged from his Tupolev aircraft into the cold, morning drizzle at Belgrade airport.

During Mr Primakov's visit, NATO announced that it was increasing its bombardments to continue 24 hours a day, but there were no air raid warnings while the Russian leader was in Belgrade.

Sirens again sounded at 5.45 p.m., shortly after his departure. The Itar-Tass agency quoted the Russian Prime Minister as saying the meeting "produced results" which he would announce later. He travelled on to Bonn for talks with the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder.

The Belgrade airport terminal where he was received by Yugoslav army officers was carpeted with broken glass from bombing on Sunday. Although the raid targeted a nearby communications centre rather than the airport, Yugoslav authorities said the explosions shattered 3,000 square metres of glass in the terminal complex.

Accompanied by his foreign and defence ministers and the chief of the Russian intelligence service, Mr Primakov was taken to Beli Dvor (the White Palace), the former residence of Yugoslav kings and of Marshal Tito, for talks with Mr Milosevic and the Serbian President, Mr Milan Milutinovic. Since the war started on March 24th, Mr Milosevic has held daily meetings with high-ranking Serbian officials and officers in the rococco interior of Beli Dvor. They have doubtless seen the smoke from repeated bombings of the radar station and vehicle factory at Racovica, just five kilometres downhill from the palace.

Some western sources speculated that the Russian and Yugoslav leaders discussed the make-up of a possible peacekeeping force for Kosovo - the issue upon which the Rambouillet peace conference foundered. More cynical observers said Mr Milosevic was dictating the conditions under which he would give up part of the Serbian province. Officially, Yugoslavia refuses to negotiate while the bombardment continues.

Because Slavic Russia and Yugoslavia share so many things - the Orthodox religion, long periods of Communist rule and similar languages - Russian troops might be more acceptable as peacekeepers than others. The closeness of the two countries is shown by the fact that Mr Milosevic made his own brother Boris his ambassador to Moscow. Even Serbs who originally favoured a NATO peacekeeping force now say the alliance has disqualified itself by attacking.

The Yugoslav Foreign Minister, Mr Zivadin Jovanovic, yesterday rejected NATO accusations of Serb atrocities in Kosovo. He claimed "the aim is to turn attention away from the NATO aggression", adding - incredibly - that "there is no repression at all".

Both sides are believed to have committed atrocities in the hellhole that Kosovo had become since the war started. According to neutral sources in Belgrade, the Serb minority there are also living in terror. Serb television has reported the bombing of Serb villages near Pristina, and the holiest Serb shrine, the 14th century convent at Gracanica, is said to have been damaged in the attacks. Gracanica figures on UNESCO's world cultural heritage list.

Yugoslavia also accuses NATO of using cluster bombs against civilians in violation of the Geneva convention, and of wounding Serb, Albanian and gypsy children in the Kosovo bombardments. On Monday, the Yugoslav army claims, its border guards stopped an incursion from Albania by up to 50 members of the Kosovo Liberation Army equipped with NATO-issue weapons, 13 of whom were killed.

Before dawn yesterday, five huge explosions destroyed a factory in the centre of Cacak, 100 km south of Belgrade. All the windows in the town were blown out by the blast.