NATO ready to act to stop fighting in Kosovo

NATO said on Friday the 16-nation military alliance was ready to act to halt the fighting in Kosovo, but Russia again rejected military intervention.

The Western military alliance had finalized planning for possible air operations, a senior NATO diplomat in Brussels said. Another Alliance source said a full arsenal of other military options was "in a high state of readiness."But in Pristina, Kosovo's provincial capital, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Nikolai Afanasyevsky said NATO intervention would not help bring peace to Kosovo. He appealed to Serbian authorities and Albanian separatists for a truce.

"We believe there is no military solution here. This includes possible military action from outside," Afanasyevsky said after meeting Ibrahim Rugova, the self-styled president of Kosovo.

In a departure from his normal hardline stand, a leading ethnic Albanian official said the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), fighting for independence from Serbia, had agreed to join Rugova's moderate Kosovars in a "government."

"They have been talking about the makeup of the new government for 10 days - there should be an announcement within days," Llaz Rmajli, head of the office of the Republic of Kosovo said.

France and Germany said they were sending their own delegation to Belgrade to put more diplomatic pressure on Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, whose offensive against ethnic Albanian separatists has sent tens of thousands of refugees fleeing from their homes.

Fighting in Kosovo itself was again sporadic, but security forces appeared to be tightening the noose around KLA strongholds in the west.

A day after the United States warned Milosevic to end his offensive or face military intervention, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana said he was ready to back international efforts to bring an end to the conflict.

Solana, on a Warsaw visit, issued a joint statement with the Polish president expressing "disquiet" and disappointment that Milosevic had not kept an earlier promise to stop his offensive.

In Tirana, the capital of Albania, Rugova told reporters a peace dialogue was impossible as long as Serbian forces kept pounding separatist guerrillas and nearby villages.

Russia's Afanasyevsky also met U.S. Kosovo envoy Chris Hill. Both had recently had long talks with Milosevic.