NATO spokesmen and exiled Albanian leaders claim the Serbs have suffered severe military losses and that their will is breaking.
But that is not how it feels here. The people of Belgrade say they are prepared for a long war, and no one, not even opponents of President Slobodan Milosevic, expects the government to give in. Serbs use the word inat, best translated as "contrariness", to describe their own character. "When someone tries to force us to do something, we always do the exact opposite," a teacher of English explains.
"We were the wrong target, because we will fight and continue to fight and continue to fight," Nebojsa Vujovic says.
A hardliner whose family was expelled from Kosovo by Marshal Josip Broz Tito in 1966, Mr Vujovic served as the Yugoslav charge d'affaires in Washington until the war started, and is now the foreign ministry spokesman. "If we are defeated militarily in some places, we will continue to fight," he adds, "because when the Turks, the Germans and the Bulgarians occupied us, we never signed a surrender. We never capitulated."
Western leaders believed that Mr Milosevic would be willing to sacrifice Kosovo, just as he sacrificed Serb minorities in Croatia and Bosnia. But commentators in Belgrade knew better. Mr Milosevic did not hold out for autonomy for Krajina, the Serb part of Croatia that was "ethnically cleansed" by Zagreb in 1995, because to do so could have justified the Albanian Kosovans' demand that their autonomous status be restored. It is precisely because Serbia has lost so much, two-thirds of the country it once dominated, that Mr Milosevic believes he must make a stand in Kosovo.
Despite 2 1/2 weeks of bombing and cruise missile attacks, despite the killing or wounding of an unknown number of Serbs and billions of dollars in damage, the war still has an unreal quality in Belgrade. After the initial shock that NATO was finally attacking, the air-raid sirens and nightly explosions are becoming routine. Life grows more difficult, the authorities began rationing mineral water yesterday, but people seem less frightened.
Outdoor cafes are crowded in the afternoon sunshine and restaurants stay open late into the evening, defying an order to close at 7 p.m. As if by tacit agreement, NATO keeps bombing empty government buildings, stripped of files, computers and even telephones. Civil servants comply with the alliance's proclaimed low-casualty strategy by locking up their offices in mid-afternoon and leaving. Some Belgraders even joke that NATO is doing them a favour by destroying so much dreadful Titoist architecture.
The stern voice of Avram Izrael, the man who announces air-raid warnings on radio and television, is now familiar to every Yugoslav. "Bill Clinton, may you be woken every morning of your life by Avram Izrael," Serbs say, claiming that a Serbian curse always comes true. There are jokes about electronic locators, the styrofoam balls dropped by NATO aircraft to help designate future targets. "What does a Serb do when he finds a locator in his garden?" one says. Answer: "Throw it in his neighbour's garden."
Daily concerts on Republic Square have become pro-Milosevic rallies, where the Serbian ruler's supporters wave picture posters of him. Nightly "human shields" on Belgrade bridges are another festive symbol of defiance.
But if jokes and demonstrations trivialise the gravity of the situation, events outside Belgrade show how perilous it is becoming. Cruise missiles were fired at the Zastava car and weapons factory in Kragujevac on Thursday night, despite the workers' well-publicised declaration that they were living in the factory to protect it; 120 were reported wounded, many seriously.
The civilian death toll in Aleksinac, where NATO bombers missed a barracks on Monday night, is now believed to total 26. Serbian television footage of devastated central Pristina, or the town of Cuprija yesterday, is a reminder that things are getting much worse.
"I feel these attacks are our punishment for Sarajevo," a devout Serb woman told me yesterday before going to church to pray on Orthodox Good Friday. "That is the only place where I do not feel we were right."
A graffito on a wall of a Yugoslav defence ministry annexe says "I hate history". If other countries are doomed to repeat history because they do not learn its lessons, the Serbs seemed doomed to pay in blood for their obsession with their own past.
It was Slobodan Milosevic's performance at the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje, where Turkish forces defeated the Serb King Lazar, that started the communist banker's rise to power. Not a day passes without public evocation of the 1369 battle and Serbia's heroic struggle against Germany in two World Wars.
On April 6th, the 58th anniversary of the German bombing of Belgrade that killed 20,000 people, the Yugoslav defence ministry issued a statement saying: "History is repeating itself". The Germans attacked Belgrade because it refused to sign the fascist Tripartite Pact, and now NATO was making war on Serbia because it refused to sign the Rambouillet accord, the statement said.
It is useless trying to point out the difference between the Nazis, responsible for the deaths of more than two million Serbs, and NATO. Serbs do not want to hear it. A US flag hanging in front of the vandalised embassy bears 50 swastikas in lieu of stars, and a crude mock death notice for President Clinton is headed with a swastika instead of a cross.
It is hard to say whether romanticised tales of medieval Serbian kings, the 14591877 Ottoman Turkish occupation or the World Wars left the deepest mark on the Serb psyche. All contained episodes of incredible violence and betrayal, and all contributed to a sense of superiority and victimhood.
The Turks considered anyone who would not convert to Islam as slaves or rayah (cattle). Orthodox Serbs were not allowed to ride a horse, wear the colour green or carry arms, except when conscripted into the Ottoman army.
Serbs often compare themselves to the Israelis. "I was born and raised in Kosovo," Nebojsa Vujovic, a Yugoslav diplomat says. "Kosovo is to the Serbs what Jerusalem is to the Jews."
Just as Israeli soldiers wept at the Wailing Wall in 1967, Serb soldiers knelt and kissed the ground of Kosovo Polje when they won it back from the Turks in 1912. Israel "ethnically cleansed" 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, then argued that they had 21 Arab countries to go to. Serbia has now, much more violently, driven out nearly that many ethnic Albanians, and similarly argues that they have a homeland to return to, Albania.
The Serbs believe they were dispossessed of Kosovo twice, first by the Turks, then by Marshal Tito, who gave the province autonomy and encouraged its "Albanisation". As with all victim peoples, this injustice confers legitimacy on all their actions, perhaps best described as the "Yes but. . ." syndrome.
When Israel is accused of bombing Arab civilians after it is attacked, Israelis like to remind critics that Hitler killed six million Jews. When Palestinian suicide bombers kill civilians in Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad say, "Yes, but Israel took our country". When Armenian extremists assassinate Turkish diplomats, they say "Yes, but the Turks killed 1.5 million Armenians."
Confronted with the evil of what they are doing to the Kosovo Albanians, Serbs expound endlessly on their historical right to the province and the Albanians' treachery in stealing it from them by intimidating the minority Serb population, having large families and bringing in relatives from Albania.
In the eyes of the Serbs, the Albanians' greatest sin is the same as the one committed earlier by their former "secessionist" enemies, the Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians, all of whom rejected rule by Belgrade.
"We did not intend any ethnic cleansing," a Yugoslav army colonel's wife told me. "It was the Albanians who started the rebellion a year ago. For years, they refused to pay for rent, electricity or water. They refused to vote. If they were not satisfied with the political system, why didn't they vote? If you have nearly two million people who refuse to take any part in the civil life of a country, what do you do?"