Serbia brushed aside the threat of NATO air strikes and ruled out foreign peacekeeping forces in Kosovo province yesterday, extinguishing a brief glimmer of hope at the stalled peace talks near Paris.
President Milan Milutinovic hunkered down behind Belgrade's defiant stand, warning that the bombing threatened by the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, on Sunday would be a "crime against humanity" which would solve nothing.
His unswerving hard line, presented at a news conference in Paris, indicated that the Serbian side was not ready for compromise, even after agreeing to meet its ethnic Albanian foes directly during Ms Albright's arm-twisting visit on Sunday.
The two sides refused to meet during the first unproductive week of talks at the 14th-century chateau in Rambouillet. Their encounter on Sunday seemed to herald a more constructive approach to the quest to end the 11-month conflict in the southern Serbian province.
At the talks, aides to the ethnic Albanians said their delegation was more optimistic that it could sign an agreement by the weekend.
"Bombing will not solve any problem. It could only cause terrible destruction and it could cost human lives," Mr Milutinovic said of the NATO threat, which Ms Albright reconfirmed after a meeting of the Contact Group in Paris on Sunday.
"It would be a war crime and a crime against humanity."
The Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Igor Ivanov, emerged from talks with both delegations yesterday predicting that a deal would be struck by the Contact Group's deadline of noon next Saturday.
But he linked this so clearly to Serbian conditions - for example, that peacekeepers could be deployed only with the agreement Belgrade refuses to grant - that diplomats said it was hard to see how this could come about.
Mr Milutinovic, flanked by the chief negotiators from the Serbian delegation, told journalists the Contact Group statement prolonging the talks was ambiguous.
"Some Europeans have a different approach" from the Americans, he said, hinting at rifts in the Contact Group - the US, Russia, France, Britain, Germany and Italy - that Belgrade might be able to exploit at the talks.
Mr Milutinovic said he told Western officials on Sunday that the threats amounted to support "for terrorism and for terrorists", a reference to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) fighting for independence for the province, in which ethnic Albanians are in the overwhelming majority.
He again dismissed NATO's plan for a 30,000-strong peacekeeping force to implement a Kosovo deal.
"If the agreement is so good and accepted by the majority of people in Kosovo, why would we need foreign troops except for chasing terrorists? And we don't need them for that," he said.
Mr Milutinovic, a close ally of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, said Serbia wanted an agreement based on the draft treaty's general principles without the annexes, which are supposed to spell out the details of the deal.
Mr Milutinovic said Belgrade's delegates were confused because, as they saw it, the general principles clashed with passages in the annexes which he said would allow eventual independence.
"We are for a unique document without annexes which will stipulate a clear and broad autonomy for Kosovo but which will also secure the presence of the state of Serbia in Kosovo," he said.
Aides to the Kosovo Albanians said they were working through the documents presented by three international mediators and would probably find phrasing that would allow them to sign a deal without giving up their hope of eventual independence.
That would leave the Serbian side under greater pressure to sign an agreement or face bombing, a prospect which sources close to the delegation said Belgrade's envoys were taking seriously.