War in the Balkans: Diplomacy - Defiant alliance steps up bombing

THE PROSPECTS of an early diplomatic breakthrough on Kosovo dimmed further yesterday as Nato stepped up its campaign of air strikes - defying Chinese demands, apparently supported by Russia, that the bombing must stop before any United Nations agreement on a plan to end the crisis.

On the streets of Peking, passions seemed to be cooling after three days of violent protest against the bombing of China's Belgrade embassy last Friday night. Posters went up at universities urging students to stay on campus, and riot police were replaced by soft-capped officers in the embassy district. Emotion may overtake the capital again today, however, when the ashes of the three journalists killed in Belgrade arrive in China.

The nationalistic mood does not bode well for today's mission of the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, when he will try to persuade the Chinese leadership not to block the UN peace plan. Yesterday, speaking after his talks with the Peking leadership, Moscow's special envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, seemed to align Russia closely with the stance taken by China since the embassy bombing.

"We support the Chinese side, that before starting negotiations and solving such a difficult process, we must first stop the bombing," Mr Chernomyrdin said. None the less, he insisted that Russia was sticking with last week's outline settlement approved by the Group of Eight nations, intended as the basis for a UN Security Council resolution.

Work on drafting that resolution is expected to begin at a meeting in Bonn on Friday of senior officials of the G8, comprising the US, Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Japan and Canada. Before that, Strobe Talbott, the US deputy secretary of state, will hold more talks in Moscow, seeking to preserve the fraying joint approach to the crisis.

Yesterday, however, the main Nato powers rejected China's demands, insisting the bombing would go on until President Slobodan Milosevic accepted their conditions. A White House spokesman did not rule out an eventual approach to the UN to approve a peace settlement but only after a Yugoslav capitulation, while the French President, Jacques Chirac, said only "a complete change of attitude" by Belgrade would satisfy the West.

Yesterday, Nato flew more than 600 sorties, one of the heaviest round of strikes since the bombing began on 24 March and, fifty days into the air campaign, the alliance is intending to step up the attacks further still by launching air strikes on Yugoslavia from Hungary and Turkey.

"Part of our strategy is to be able to effectively encircle Yugoslavia 360 degrees," said the Nato spokesman Jamie Shea. "We are in touch with a number of allies and partners to extend bases and airspace agreements." Nato has already announced that it will deploy 24 F-18 fighter bombers to the Taszar air base in southern Hungary, one of the alliance's newest members.

Hungary is taking a big risk in joining the war: it is the only Nato state that borders Serbia, and the autonomous Serb province of Vojvodina contains a large ethnic Hungarian population. The stakes are high for Turkey as well. Greece, its Nato partner and adversary, is the alliance state with the most misgivings about the conflict.

The proposal seems to stem from the desire of General Wesley Clark, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, to intensify the fight against Belgrade. There have also been reports that General Clark wants to put Multiple- Launch Rocket Systems into Croatia, Serbia's former partner in Yugoslavia. The strategy seems to be to increase the fight at precisely the moment when Belgrade seems to want to scale it down.

It would also force Serbia to disperse further its air defence systems. Despite weeks of bombing, Nato aircraft still face substantial problems from low-level anti-aircraft and missiles.