NATO appears to have won the war in the Balkans-and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's fate may now be sealed. These are the two things that were decided on June 3 when first the Serbian parliament and then the Serbian leader accepted the same NATO peace plan that had been on the table all along.

This is victory for the West, even for all the caveats that have to be entered about Milosevic's track record of broken promises, and all the concerns that may be felt about the compromises made-and perhaps still to be made-with Russia.

Some hard facts about what is in the deal are heartening. All Serbian forces must leave Kosovo within a period of one to two weeks. The bombing will continue until substantial withdrawals are verified. Only a token force of Serbian soldiers and police (hundreds, not thousands) will ever return.

But Serb forces have not been defeated in battle or reduced to a ruined shell that would force Milosevic to sue for a humiliating peace. Milosevic will make much of that.

The Serbs will keep their sovereignty over Kosovo. There will be no clear NATO protectorate, but a messy UN arrangement under which NATO and Russian forces will have to live in an uneasy cohabitation.

With the peace deal deliberately ambiguous over NATO's and Russia's respective roles, the biggest difficulty is still over the precise make-up of an international peacekeeping force.

The footnote to the peace agreement makes it clear that NATO's understanding of its security role is not formally accepted by Russia, and that Russia insists its peacekeeping forces will not fall under NATO's unified command.

"NATO will command the NATO force, Russia, the Russian forces," Moscow's Kosovo envoy, Viktor Chernomyrdin, said in Bonn before travelling to Belgrade. "Relations between the two contingents will be governed by separate agreements, " he added.

In Brussels, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea confirmed that alliance forces and the Russians would have their own areas of command.

The Russian phraseology immediately fuelled speculation about a virtual partition of Kosovo. That is something which, in a pinch, Milosevic has probably long contemplated as part of an exit strategy.

Yet Russia is already worrying about how it will be able to pay for its Kosovo deployments. The country is badly out of pocket already on its aid, including free oil, to Serbia. Russia is already too stretched in too many ways-including by keeping its domestic economic misery quietly contained-to contemplate any serious partition adventures.

What's in it for Slobodan Milosevic?

He is said to be a coldly calculating master puppeteer, yet his lack of strategic insight over the years has led to the collapse of the Yugoslav Federation and to the devastation of Serbia.

Crude nationalism, egged on by a self-deluding myth of Serbs as perennial victims, propelled Milosevic to the apex of Serb power ten years ago. It now seems to have become his nemesis.

If Chernomyrdin, an old communist apparatchik-turned-tycoon-exactly the kind of man Milosevic instinctively trusts and with whom he feels comfortable-said the game was up, Milosevic might well have listened.

A semi-pariah state such as Belarus might offer Milosevic an exile's haven. But a dacha outside Minsk cannot be his ideal for a gracious retirement.

Can Milosevic-pilloried as a war criminal and shaken by the knowledge of his massive misjudgment of NATO's intentions-survive now? For a start, he is not much loved by his own people. Two years ago, street demonstrations nearly finished him off. He now probably has the solid support of only about a fifth of Yugoslav voters.

Calls for Milosevic to resign came within minutes of the parliament's accepting the West's Kosovo peace agreement. "The war is over," Dragan Veselino, an opposition deputy, told reporters as he emerged from the chamber after voting to accept the deal. "It is surrender, capitulation. Now we want free elections, free media. We want him [Milosevic] to go."

Serbs know that international investors and donors are unlikely to rebuild Serbia as long as Milosevic remains in power.

But cornered as he is, Milosevic has plenty of fight left in him yet. He can claim for his surrender the political cover of the Yugoslav parliament, which voted June 3 to accept the peace deal.

His secret police and army, his family-connected network of businessmen and cronies-who control much of the economy, suborn politicians, and corral most of the media-all contrive to keep him going.

In the next few months, maybe even weeks, Milosevic will have to prove himself the master-wriggler he is fabled to be or be consigned to the dustbin of history as a tinpot dictator who brought disaster on his people and himself.