uExpress.com: Georgie Anne Geyer by Georgie Anne Geyer -- (07/02/1999) RUSSIA ENTERED KOSOVO TO DISRUPT NATO OPERATION

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RUSSIA ENTERED KOSOVO TO DISRUPT NATO OPERATION

07/02/1999

WASHINGTON -- We now know beyond the shadow of a doubt what the Russians were really doing in Kosovo. As NATO went all-out to defeat the first attempted genocide in Europe in half a century, Moscow, even while pretending to be the West's mediator, was deliberately providing men to fight on the ground with the Serbs.

We know, both from American journalists in Kosovo and from the highest levels of the American defense establishment, that Russian "visitors" and technicians were coaching Belgrade on those same anti-NATO air defenses that were the first major target of NATO bombers.

We know that there was a full Russian unit of at least 200 men fighting with the Serbs and that at least two Russian high officers were killed by the Kosovo Liberation Army. In the final, and probably decisive, fighting in the mountains near the Albanian border, a professional Russian unit was fighting on the Serb side.

Part of the story was broken by Newsday's Roy Gutman, one of our most courageous and insightful foreign correspondents, and a man who knows the Balkans more intimately than probably any Western journalist. Carrying the Russian story an important step further, he reported on June 22 that not only were Russian "volunteers" there, fighting in Kosovo, but that they had participated in the killing of hundreds of ethnic Albanians and also in the destruction of towns and villages around the key city of Prizren. When NATO entered Kosovo, he wrote, German troops ordered this contingent to leave the province, and it did.

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The careful reader might ask here, Aren't you going too far? Isn't it, for instance, possible that these Russians could actually have been volunteers or mercenaries, men with no direct tie to the Russian government? What about some context to this story?"

Well, those are good questions, if only because they evoke deeper thought about today's crucial relations between the Russia state and the American administration and between the Russian military and NATO. They help us to illuminate real Russian intentions against the Western determination to build a Europe that includes Eastern and even Southeastern (formerly the Balkans) Europe.

There is some indication, for instance, that, yes, perhaps some of the Russians were indeed volunteers or mercenaries. Still, when one looks carefully at the overall Russian political, diplomatic and military performance over Kosovo -- and even when one gives Moscow the benefit of the doubt over troop issues -- one can only come to the conclusion that Moscow remains a power center that has none of the West's interests in common.

Only a few recent examples: Months before the NATO's euphemistically named "diplomacy backed by force" in Kosovo, Moscow irritated NATO officers by trying to assign a senior mlitary intelligence officer to the alliance's command headquarters. He was rejected by NATO, which judged he was sent there only to spy.

When the Russians whisked 200 some of their troops to take the Pristina airport ahead of NATO, everyone was surprised. The full story is that the lightning move, fully coordinated and planned in Moscow at the highest levels, was to open a wedge in Kosovo for thousands of Russian troops to arrive and thwart NATO's plans. Indeed, no less a major paper than Moscow's Komsomolskaya Pravda has confirmed this attempt "to disrupt the NATO operation."

Even as I write this, the front pages here in Washington report how Russian strategic bombers flew within striking distance of the United States last week, over Norway and Iceland, marking the first time since the end of the Cold War that they have been so provocative and brazen. At the same time, the Russian state continues, not to beg for, but to demand of the West more extravagant loans that will, like all the others before them, go eternally unpaid.

The Europeans, as well as many Americans in this administration, will argue that Moscow does behave that way (and isn't it a shame?), but we can't afford to turn our backs on them; let's treat them decently and hope they'll change; they're a poor country and ...

But this is where the predominating Western response is so dangerously faulty. Respect for Russia, surely. Giving in on everything or, worse, being blackmailed by the threat of bad behavior into pretending that their behavior is somehow without intent or outcome, no!

As Radio Free Europe's excellent analyst Paul Goble argued recently: "When some states conclude that they can extract even greater rewards by failing to cooperate or even by seeking to frustrate the policies of those who provide them with help, there is the risk that these states will decide that bad behavior works and hence will engage in more of it. ... To the extent that Moscow, Beijing and other governments around the world decide to operate on that expectation, the world is likely to become a more dangerous place. That would be precisely the outcome that those in a position to offer assistance have said they want to avoid."