Foreign Ministers from the six powers who make up the Yugoslav Contact Group will meet today in London to deliver an ultimatum to Serbia to halt its bloody campaign in Kosovo by a particular date or face potential military action.
NATO defence ministers last night gave a sabre-rattling foretaste of their determination to stop what is seen as a new round of ethnic cleansing by asking the alliance's military planners to prepare a full range of options for military intervention and ordering air exercises "as soon as possible" on Serbia's borders.
"Today we have shown we are ready to back up international diplomacy with our military means," the NATO Secretary-General, Mr Javier Solana, said, while accusing President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia of going "beyond the limits of tolerable behaviour".
The British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, also signalled the seriousness with which the issue is being viewed by meeting the moderate Kosovan Albanian leader, Dr Ibrahim Rugova, in London.
Mr Blair told him it was an "urgent priority" to stop the aggression, but that a "credible deterrent would need a proper legal basis" and he promised to do what he could to get international backing for that, a spokesman said.
Getting that legal basis - endorsement by the UN Security Council for a US-British resolution allowing "all necessary means" to curb the violence - is still proving difficult, because of Russian and Chinese reservations.
But while the NATO declaration last night also made clear any military action would be based on the "relevant legal basis", the US Defence Secretary, Mr William Cohen, said a UN resolution authorising military action was "desirable but not imperative", signalling for the first time Washington's willingness to act independently of the world body.
The NATO ministerial statement said the planning options should cover "the full range" for "halting or disrupting a systematic campaign of violence, repression and expulsion in Kosovo". And the ministers directed NATO's military to organise the air exercises "as quickly as possible with the aim of demonstrating NATO's capacity to project power rapidly into the region".
Military experts will be told to plan a range of eight options for Kosovo, including a no-fly zone, a heavy weapons exclusion zone, suppression of the Yugoslav air force, air strikes at selected targets, and ground forces' intervention.
On his way in to the meeting the German Defence Minister, Mr Volker Ruehe, said that options to be prepared could even include picking targets for NATO air strikes throughout the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the planning for a last-resort intervention to stop the bloodshed would also include ground troops.
He said the full study would be completed by the end of the month.
But the priority scenarios developed by the military will certainly not be based on intervention on the ground as the use of air power from bases in neighbouring countries is seen as both effective and politically easier to win support for among the allies.
