War In The Balkans: Timetable

Monday 5 April

12.20am: Nato missiles strike at Belgrade's main airport and targets in Kosovo.

Noon: Five French planes carrying humanitarian aid for ethnic Albanian refugees leave for Macedonia and Albania.

1pm: Serbian state television (RTS) shows footage of a meeting in Pristina between the moderate Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and the Russian ambassador to Belgrade. RTS does not specify when the meeting took place.

2pm: Nato says 31 relief flights are to go to Albania and Macedonia to help the 360,000 ethnic Albanians who have been driven from Kosovo over the past two weeks.

2.30pm: Russia says it will send clothes, food and medicine worth more than $1m (pounds 600,000) to Yugoslavia to help people of all ethnic groups.

3pm: The UN World Food Programme says three US aircraft with food for refugees will leave Italy for Albania and the flights will increase to 10 a day later this week.

5.30pm: Reports emerge that refugees fleeing to Montenegro from Mitrovica, Kosovo's third biggest city, have been forced into Serbia after Nato bombers destroyed a bridge at Montenegro's eastern border.

6pm: The Albanian government announces it is refusing to allow ethnic Albanian refugees to be evacuated to other countries as this would make Albania part of the ethnic-cleansing mechanism.

6.40pm: The first 150 refugees are flown out from Macedonia bound for Turkey.

7.10pm: Air raid sirens sound in Belgrade.

7.30pm: Nato approves deployment of 24 Apache attack helicopters, 18 multiple rocket launchers and 2,600 men to Albania.

9.30pm: Five explosions reported at southern city of Nis, HQ of Yugoslavian Third Army, according to Tanjug news agency.

9.50pm: Two explosions in the northern city of Novi Sad, Tanjug said.

11.40pm: Serb TV reports impacts at fuel depot near Sombar, near Hungarian border and coal-mining centre of Aleksinac south of Belgrade.