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The offensive struck along a 700-mile line, penetrating Krajina in 30 places. Tudjman threw 100,000 soldiers--the full battle strength of Croatia's army--against about 50,000 Serbs. For the most part, the Croats have been armed from stocks of Soviet weapons that were supposed to be destroyed after the cold war but instead found their way to the black market or were sold to Croatia by Ukraine, despite the U.N.-mandated embargo against trading in arms with the former Yugoslavia. "There is no stopping this now," says one military expert, referring to the offensive. "It is what Tudjman wants and the military has been built to do. And they can do."
The Krajina army was originally expected to employ a collapsing defense strategy, holding a prepared line for a time, then falling back to another prepared position until it reached an area that was finally defensible. Experts deemed it a reasonable strategy; not only is Krajina too large to defend in its entirety, but the weight of both geography and history were on their side. "They are frontiersmen," said one Western diplomat in Belgrade, who pointed out that Serbs were first sent to Krajina by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a buffer against the Turks. "These guys were the eternal defense." On Saturday night, however, the situation took an unexpected twist when word arrived that the entire Krajina Serb army seemed to have vanished. While Serb resistance could simply have scattered in the face of the Croats' furious advance, the mystery of the Krajina army's disappearance immediately provoked suspicions that the Croatian Serbs may have been headed en masse for Bosnia with the intention of linking up with Radovan Karadzic, self-styled leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Barely 24 hours earlier, Karadzic had added to his portfolio by unexpectedly demoting his military commander, General Ratko Mladic, and appointing himself supreme head of the Bosnian Serb armed forces. If Krajina's 50,000 armed Serbs were to place themselves, even temporarily, under Karadzic's control, it could once again change the equation in Bosnia's ever mutating balance of power.
Caught between the two sides in the battles last week were U.N. peacekeepers. On Friday a Danish soldier was killed and two Poles were wounded when Croatian units began shelling several U.N. observation posts. By the end of the week two more peacekeepers, both Czech, had been killed, and more than 90 U.N. soldiers had been detained by the Croats. Although there was no immediate Allied military response to the attacks, French General Bernard Janvier, head of U.N. troops in the former Yugoslavia, pledged air support to U.N. peacekeepers who were coming under fire. A pair of U.S. Navy EA-6B warplanes demonstrated the allies' resolve at dusk on Friday when they unleashed a pair of missiles at a Serb missile battery near Knin.
The Croatian onslaught created a rift among NATO allies, who had only recently come together with a new, tougher policy toward the war in Bosnia. Earlier in the week the alliance had announced it would apply to all Bosnian "safe havens" the same rules it had already laid down for Gorazde--calling for pre-emptive air strikes if the areas are seriously threatened. By Thursday, the Serbs had apparently heeded the warning and pulled back.