NATO yesterday set at just over 3,000 the number of weapons its troops will collect from ethnic Albanian rebels over the next month under a peace accord in Macedonia, Western military sources said.
NATO officials were due to meet the Macedonian President, Mr Boris Trajkovski, and other government representatives to inform them of the figure, which is well below earlier Macedonian estimates of the rebels' arsenal.
With NATO troops due to begin collecting the weapons at points around north-west Macedonia as of Monday and with a 30-day deadline for completing the operation, officials at alliance headquarters in Brussels said the number of NATO soldiers involved would climb from the initially planned 3,500 to 4,500-5,000.
Gen Gunnar Lange of NATO, who is commanding Operation Essential Harvest, announced that NATO officials and the rebels had reached agreement on the number of arms to be collected.
"The numbers are credible now and close to our own assessment," he said, withholding the figures until they were presented to the government.
A Western military source however said the agreed on estimate was "just above 3,000" weapons.
On Thursday, the Macedonian government had said it believed the rebel National Liberation Army (NLA) was holding at least 60,000 various weapons, but NATO officials insisted this was exaggerated.
NATO has promised the government it will collect one third of the weapons by August 31st, when Macedonia's parliament meets to debate constitutional changes agreed in the Western-mediated peace deal between Macedonian Slav and ethnic Albanian political leaders on August 13th.
Meanwhile on Macedonia's border with the UN-administrated Yugoslav province of Kosovo, the rebel NLA has continued to hamper the operation by moving weapons in and out of Macedonia, NATO officials said.
Meanwhile the Russian President, Mr Vladimir Putin, accused NATO of carrying out "pseudo operations" in Macedonia and said tougher action was needed to ensure ethnic Albanian rebels cannot rearm once they hand over their weapons to NATO forces.
Speaking after talks with President Trajkovski, Mr Putin warned that NATO's Operation Essential Harvest to collect rebel weapons would be ineffective unless the arms supply was fully cut off.
The conflict cannot be resolved "by statements or pseudo peace actions", Mr Putin said. "If they really want to resolve this problem, they must first of all set about cutting off the channels through which arms are supplied in this region," he said.
Both leaders placed the blame for the crisis firmly on the Albanians, saying that the problem in the region comes "from Kosovo". Mr Trajkovski, for his part, called on Moscow to step up its role in the Balkans, saying that "the time is right for Russia and Macedonia to act together to resolve the overall problem" in the region.
Mr Trajkovski, who is attending ceremonies marking Ukraine's 10 years of independence with Mr Putin, said both leaders believed that the fighting was caused by unrest in of Kosovo. He announced that a conference of Balkan leaders will be held "to confirm existing borders", ITAR-TASS reported, in a move that would send a clear message to ethnic Albanians to abandon dreams of carving out a greater Albania in the Balkans.