When I asked him if he had a plan for the creation of a greater Serbia, he negated it convincingly. He said the idea was not feasible because it would cost a lot of blood, Primakov said, referring to his first meeting with Milosevic in Belgrade on January 8, 1993. Primakov was head of the Russian counterintelligence service KGB at the time.
At the meeting, Milosevic accepted the Vance-Owen peace plan for Bosnia-Herzegovina and later imposed sanctions on the Bosnian Serbs for rejecting it, the witness said.
Primakov said that Russia viewed the Bosnian war as a civil war encouraged by interference from the outside, in which three parties fought for their own interests. He added that the position of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was the same, citing his talks with CIA Director James Wolsey.
The US position towards the accused was one of an extremely ideological nature, the former Russian prime minister said, adding that Milosevic had upset US geopolitical plans by trying to preserve Yugoslavia, for which reason the US decided to weaken Serbia.
According to Primakov, this policy was reinforced with the arrival of the Clinton administration in 1993, which he said wanted to complete the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
Primakov said that Russia was in favour of stabilising the situation, ending the bloodshed and achieving peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and that it supported Milosevic's efforts to ensure acceptance of the Vance-Owen peace plan.
The witness confirmed that Russia wanted the international sanctions against Belgrade to be limited only to the arms embargo.
Primakov cited former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright as saying that without Milosevic there would have been no positive outcome in Dayton, where a peace agreement for Bosnia-Herzegovina was signed in 1995.
Testifying about the war in Kosovo and the NATO bombing campaign, Primakov said that the US and Western partners in the Contact Group had supported an interim solution whereby Kosovo would have become a third republic in the rump Yugoslav federation of Serbia and Montenegro.
Unlike his testimony about the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Primakov did not confirm all the allegations made by Milosevic, saying that there had been incidents on the Serbian side that possibly warranted demands for action in order to stop the spiral of violence.
Asked if the NATO bombing in the spring of 1999 caused a wave of refugees from Kosovo, the witness said that it was not exactly like that, but that the whole process started with air strikes. He cited US vice-president Al Gore, who justified the NATO campaign by millions of Albanian refugees in the mountains.
Primakov concluded by saying that the NATO bombing had not helped solve the problem because the reality today showed that Kosovo was far away from a solution.