War in the Balkans: Russians and US 'Narrow Differences'; Russia

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THE WEST yesterday moved decisively to mend fences with an unhappy Russia but made little concrete progress on the more urgent question of bringing an end to the three-week Yugoslav war.

A heavily billed meeting between Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, and her Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, in Oslo yielded only a vague mutual pledge to go on talking in search for a solution to the crisis.

These were the first face-to-face talks between the two since the start of the conflict and - importantly - they clearly helped patch up some of the rawer grievances between Moscow and Washington, whose relations have sharply deteriorated. But two critical sticking …