Russia said yesterday that NATO's air war against Yugoslavia one year ago had only aggravated the Kosovo crisis and accused the UN administration in the province of supporting ethnic Albanian separatists.
The Russian government also refused to send police officers to a special UN-led police force in Kosovo but said an agreed number of Yugoslav Serb security forces should be allowed back into the province.
Moscow froze its ties with NATO after the alliance launched its aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia on March 24th, 1999, to make Belgrade halt a violent purge of the rebellious ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo. The air war lasted 78 days.
NATO-Russian relations have recovered somewhat of late but a barrage of criticism by Moscow three days before a Russian presidential election came as no surprise.
The Foreign Minister, Mr Igor Ivanov, in an article in the daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta, said: "The NATO operation, launched under the invented pretext of protecting [Kosovo] Albanians, only aggravated inter-ethnic tensions and most non-Albanians have been purged from there [since then]."
He said that, because the Kosovo crisis remained unresolved, "a threat of a Balkan tragedy becomes more and more realistic".
Mr Ivanov did not detail the threat. But Gen Leonid Ivashov, of the Defence Ministry's international relations department, said violence may explode in Kosovo itself, in Montenegro and Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina.
Gen Ivashov said the hottest spot was the Presevo Valley in south Serbia, an area on the administrative boundary with Kosovo populated primarily, like Kosovo, by ethnic Albanians.
He said Kosovo Albanian extremists were smuggling arms to the valley to try to provoke clashes with Yugoslav forces which would provoke NATO intervention, a scenario similar to Kosovo, but that Kfor peacekeepers in Kosovo were taking no notice.
"We have observed that the US contingent is closing its eyes to incursions into Serbia," he said, adding a warning that Yugoslav forces were well prepared and would not hesitate to defend the country's sovereignty.