One week after NATO launched its bomber and cruise missile strikes against Yugoslavia with the specific aim of protecting ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, most of the worst-case scenarios have come true.
Based on experience in Bosnia, the US and its allies believed President Slobodan Milosevic would cave in after taking a few blows and sign the Rambouillet agreement. Naively, NATO thought a dispute of immense complexity could be magically solved at the touch of a few hi-tech triggers.
Yesterday's visit to Belgrade by the Russian Prime Minister, Mr Yevgeni Primakov, was the first serious mediation attempt since the conflict started.
When he landed in Bonn for further talks with the German Chancellor, Mr Gerhard Schroder, Mr Primakov said that Mr Milosevic had six conditions for negotiating a peace accord, the first of which is a complete cessation of all air strikes against Yugoslavia. It was unlikely that NATO - which has staked its prestige on breaking Mr Milosevic in Kosovo - would suddenly allow him to dictate the conditions for a return to the negotiating table.
Here in Belgrade, Mr Primakov's peace mission was seen as a gesture to the powerful pro-Milosevic Communist lobby in the Russian Duma (parliament).
Throughout the crisis, Russia has played a double game which makes it well-placed as a mediator. The pro-Yugoslav statements are for domestic political consumption, while in private the Russians tell Western diplomats how fed up they were with Mr Milosevic. Russia's desperate need for economic aid may not be unrelated to Moscow's private sympathy for NATO's predicament.
For the time being, the greatest obstacle to successful peacemaking is that it is in neither side's interest to stop the war yet. If NATO calls off its bombardments before Mr Milosevic has yielded, the alliance will be humiliated on its 50th birthday, April 4th.
A statement by Mr Milosevic, read by an anchorwoman on Belgrade television last night, did not even mention the crucial issue of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo.
He had promised last October to withdraw Serb forces from Kosovo and allow refugees to return, and broke his word; why, NATO justifiably asked after the Primakov initiative, should he keep his promise this time?
Mr Milosevic has much to gain by allowing the war to continue. With each day that passes, as tens of thousands of Albanians flee Kosovo, he moves nearer to the Serb dream of an "ethnically pure" Kosovo. The war has emasculated the feeble opposition to his rule.
NATO did not reckon with the stubbornness of the Yugoslavs - the only people who succeeded in driving the Nazis from their country in the second World War.
"A man who is willing and capable can resist technical superiority," the commander of the Yugoslav Air Force, General Spasoje Smiljanic, told us this week. "A nation is invincible if it knows what it is sacrificing and defending."
Incredibly, NATO appears to have made no alternative plans in the event that the Serb leader not only refused to give in but took advantage of the assault to "ethnically cleanse" Kosovo.
There was little preparation for an enormous refugee crisis which should have been foreseeable, and NATO's political refusal to expose its own troops to danger was so total that no provision was made for a ground offensive. Mr Milosevic's task was made easier because NATO told him exactly what it would and would not do before the war started.
The past week of war in the Balkans has made it clear that Serb forces will not be driven out and Albanians cannot be protected by air power alone.
Now NATO cannot move soldiers and armour to the region quickly enough and in sufficient numbers to prevent the catastrophe that is taking place.
NATO's state-of-the-art technology is strangely inappropriate to a war in which the Serbs' main weapons are sidearms, knives, paraffin and matches.
NATO may claim the moral high ground by attacking infrastructure rather than people, but it is not stopping the "ethnic cleansers" who, for their own safety, have moved out of barracks and into the homes of "cleansed" Albanians in densely-populated areas of Kosovo.
NATO had planned to move against Serb ground forces in Kosovo with low-flying attack aircraft and helicopters as soon as the Serbs' air defence capability was wiped out. Here again, Mr Milosevic outfoxed them.
The Serbs have reserved the bulk of their mobile anti-aircraft artillery, turning off the radars so that they cannot be located and moving the equipment constantly to protect it.
If the Western alliance takes the risk of using its "tankbusters", the Serbs are likely to shoot down aircraft, capture the pilots and parade them through the streets of Belgrade.
Another evasive tactic used by the Yugoslav Air Force is to scramble their best MiG fighters each time there is an air-raid warning. NATO claimed the two Yugoslav MiG 29s shot down last Friday night intended to attack troops in the Stabilisation Force (S-For) in Bosnia.
But it now appears they were trying to escape attack in Yugoslavia. If military or troops are bombed, the aircraft simply land on highways.
While Mr Primakov was negotiating his doomed peace initiative with Mr Milosevic at the Veli Dvar palace, the word "partition" kept coming up elsewhere. Most of the "ethnic cleansing" undertaken by Serb forces in Kosovo has occurred in the north and east of the Serbian province.
A second World War scenario could be repeated: in 1941, Serbia's Nazi occupiers kept the top half of Kosovo with its lead, zinc, cadmium, silver and gold mines around the town of Mitrovica, and Italy took the southern portion.
Mr Milosevic hopes the NATO coalition will collapse in discord. Then he could keep northern Kosovo and the surviving Albanians would live in a NATO-protected "safe haven" in the south.