``Use of force won't help normalise the situation, it'll do just the opposite,'' foreign minister Igor Ivanov warned in an interview with Interfax news agency.

President Boris Yeltsin continued to press for a political solution to the crisis in Kosovo, the ethnic Albanian-majority province in southern Yugoslavia.

``There is no solution by force to the Kosovo problem. Its source lies in an ethnic conflict, and bombs cannot solve ethnic conflicts,'' Ivanov said in an interview on Monday night at the ORT television station.

Ivanov told Interfax that if the UN Security Council considers applying force in Kosovo, Russia would definitely use its right to veto.

Ivanov said that Russia would do everything to reach a ``political regulation of the situation''.

Yeltsin told Germany's chancellor-elect Gerhard Shroeder that Yugoslavia hadaccepted a Russian proposal to invite an international delegation to investigate the crisis, Yeltsin's press service said.