The American senior envoy, Mr Richard Holbrooke, was last night struggling to save the Kosovo peace process, holding late-night talks in Belgrade with President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia as a fresh Serb offensive tore through the province.
After six-and-a-half hours of talks Mr Holbrooke said no positions had changed. Western sources say Mr Holbrooke offered to unfreeze financial sanctions placed on Yugoslavia if Mr Milosevic agreed to sign a US-drafted peace plan.
But with NATO in disarray over whether to threaten Mr Milosevic with air strikes, and Kosovo's guerrillas also refusing to sign the plan, Mr Milosevic was last night in belligerent mood, saying there could be no concessions.
In the province itself, powerful Serb forces smashed into positions of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army in the central and southern regions, leaving at least one village ablaze and sending hundreds more refugees fleeing to the hills.
Reporters arriving in the burning village, Ivaja, found one dead man in civilian clothes, lying in a street along with several dead animals. One survivor, an 84-year-old pensioner named Mr Ramadan Muljoki, was found caked in his own blood and suffering from shock after being beaten by Serb troops.
"They beat me with rifles and asked me if I knew anyone from the KLA," he said. "They asked me if my son was in the KLA and I said No and they beat me again."
Most of the rest of the population were last night among the growing army of pitiful refugees now reappearing across this province. There are fewer of them than in the summer - they are now in their hundreds, rather than thousands - but their predicament is worse because of the sub-zero temperatures each night.
International monitors said the Serbs had released all but 35 of approximately 100 men they separated from their women and children the day before and took to a police base for interrogation.
Meanwhile in the central Drenica region, Serb tanks and artillery pounded guerrilla positions around the town of Vucitrn. Houses in several villages were last night in flames, but monitors were unable to get to the battlefield to determine casualties.
The current fighting seems designed to show the impotence of the West, which is still riven by disagreements over how to persuade Serbs and Albanians to sign the peace plan that gives Kosovo's Albanian majority autonomy.
The United States insists air strikes will be used against Serb targets unless Mr Milosevic not only signs the plan, which he says he might do, but also allows NATO troops to enforce it, something he refuses.
But NATO allies, notably France and Italy, say they are unwilling to bomb under such conditions.
Even US resolve appeared to wobble yesterday, with the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, urging Congress to delay debating whether to allow American troops to be included in the force.
She fears that legislators, worried by violence against American troops in nearby Bosnia over the weekend, may block the proposal. That in turn would probably kill the peacekeeping mission, because European nations are unwilling to send soldiers without US participation.
Congress will debate today whether to endorse a plan to send an initial force of 2,000 US marines, now deployed on ships in the Mediterranean, to spearhead a 28,000-strong peacekeeping force.
"A vote at any time to oppose an authorisation would be taken by both sides as a green light to resume fighting," Ms Albright said.
But diplomats in the region say the damage has already been done, with Mr Milosevic exploiting uncertainty in NATO's ranks.
Mr Milosevic released a statement last night saying: "Any settlement for peace which includes the deployment of foreign troops in our country is unacceptable."
Mr Holbrooke, the architect of Bosnia's peace agreement in 1995, is believed to be offering to unfreeze a block on the IMF and the World Bank lending money to Yugoslavia, which is nearly bankrupt as a result.
Mr Milosevic is desperate for cash, with wars, corruption and sanctions leaving him with less than £100 million of foreign reserves. However, funding his administration would mean strengthening him.
Meanwhile, infighting, so far only political, has erupted within the Kosovo Liberation Army after hardline members refused to sign the peace plan, embarrassing US officials who claimed on Monday they had done so.
The KLA's high command, based among the large Kosovo Albanian Diaspora in Switzerland and Germany, gathered at Munich on Sunday to endorse the peace plan. But some commanders of front-line units have since vetoed the decision, holding out for full independence.
"It is madness, it's only stupid," said one furious senior KLA official, speaking by phone from the high command in Geneva. "This is not about being nationalistic, this is not about politics, this is about calculations linked to self-interest."
He said that the KLA risked losing the support of the people, as successive Serb offensives rip through village after village.