In a snowstorm on the streets of the Kosovan capital, the forest-green berets of the Royal Green Jackets are being replaced by the red and white hackles on the blue berets of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, the British army battalion who succeed them for the next six-month tour.
"I leave this city feeling more optimistic about it than when I arrived", says Lieut Col Nick Carter, the outgoing Green Jackets commander.
"The murder rate is down to one a month, there are more Serbs living here than in October, and people feel more confident about walking around the streets. That said, it is no bed of roses."
Nor is the rest of Kosovo, say a variety of international officials, looking back to the start of NATO's 78-day bombing campaign, which began on March 24th last year. In the middle of the campaign, on April 23rd, NATO said at a summit in Washington that "the action against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia is aimed at supporting political objectives - peace, multi-ethnicity and democracy."
A year on, many senior officials from NATO and the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) see much more pragmatic reasons behind NATO's decision to intervene militarily on behalf of the Albanian population of Kosovo.
"Up front", says a senior official from the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, "it was about returning Kosovar Albanians to their hom es, and bluntly speaking stopping them being killed by the Serbs.
"But it was about more than that. It was about us creating in and around Kosovo a new frontier, a cornerstone of the new Europe."
"Kosovo was, and always will be, about containment", said one former official from the International Committee of the Red Cross who worked in Kosovo, Albania and Serbia before, during and after the bombing. "It is about the Americans controlling Macedonia and holding down Albanian expansionism, and building themselves a huge tactical military base out of which they can operate in the Balkans."
The 39,000 NATO troops from 29 countries, known as Kfor, or Kosovo Force, are deployed across the tiny province. The largest US military base since the Vietnam War has been built at Camp Bondsteel, 30 km southeast of Pristina.
For the German, Austrian, Italian, Dutch and Swiss governments, Kosovo is the fledgling UN protectorate to which they can repatriate the hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians and other Yugoslavians.
The German Interior Minister, Mr Otto Schilly, signed an agreement with the UN Mission in Kosovo and with the Macedonian government to repatriate up to 180,000 Kosovar Albanians living in Germany before the end of 2000. He announced last month that "forceful measures" could be used.
On its 50th anniversary last year, NATO wanted to show it was capable of successful humanitarian military intervention, as well as proving that the military structures of the US and the EU could co-operate efficiently.
"Kosovo was where we were going to make this work", says one senior NATO official. "It was our exercise in multinational peacekeeping that was to decide how military humanitarian intervention is going to work for the next 50 years."
And what of peace, democracy and multi-ethnicity? More than 240,000 non-Albanians have fled since NATO arrived last June, and as a result of daily violence and harassment by Albanians, the remaining Serb, Roma gypsy and Montenegrin populations of Kosovo are increasingly obliged to live in ethnic enclaves, under heavy NATO protection.
"They do not have to make love to each other every day", says NATO's senior commander in Kosovo, Gen Klaus Reinhardt of Germany. "They just have to live together without killing each other." One aide close to UN Civil Administrator Dr Bernard Kouchner says oppression of Serbs by Albanians has made communal life "impossible in the short term".
Peace is a comparative term too. Serbs are forced to travel around Kosovo in buses protected by NATO armoured vehicles. It is effectively impossible to speak Serbian - once the national language - on the streets of Pristina without risk of attack.
The recent backlash between Albanians and Serbs since the beginning of February in the ethnically divided city of Mitrovica has left 12 Albanians and Serbs killed, and more than 120 people, including Kfor peacekeepers and journalists, injured.
Every day Kfor reports numerous incidents of murders of Serbs, arson attacks on their homes, intimidation and harassment, as well as escalating levels of criminal violence within the Albanian community.
Despite the announcement this month by Dr Kouchner that municipal elections will be held in Kosovo before the end of the year, the US Assistant Secretary of State, Mr James Rubin, criticised Albanian political leaders, saying the US was "deeply disappointed with the failures of Kosovar Albanian leaders".