The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation yesterday gave the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, an additional 10 days to comply with UN resolutions on Kosovo before allied air strikes begin.
The NATO council of allied ambassadors extended to October 27th the deadline for Belgrade to withdraw its troops from Kosovo before possible air strikes were launched against targets in Serbia.
NATO forces are already on alert, the formal "activation order" having been issued last Tuesday.
Yesterday's extension supersedes an earlier deadline of 5 a.m. GMT today and is an attempt to maintain pressure on Belgrade while the international community starts to deploy monitors in the region.
In an accord struck by the US envoy, Mr Richard Holbrooke, with Belgrade on Tuesday, Mr Milosevic pledged to withdraw his forces from Kosovo and allow 2,000 monitors into the region to verify the withdrawal.
A NATO spokesman, Mr Jamie Shea, said yesterday's decision was taken after the North Atlantic Council (NAC) "took stock" of the situation in Kosovo.
"We are still at some distance from full compliance. There is clear evidence that many army and special units that are normally based outside Kosovo are still deployed in Kosovo," he said.
Mr Shea said NATO was calling on Mr Milosevic "to take urgent steps to ensure that full compliance is achieved in this time period". NATO, he said, expected the additional Serb units operating in Kosovo to be withdrawn immediately.
Meanwhile in Bonn, Germany's outgoing parliament voted overwhelmingly in emergency session to allow German soldiers and aircraft to take part in the proposed NATO action.
It was the first time Germany had given the green light to the possible use of force outside NATO boundaries without a specific UN mandate.
The Chancellor-elect, Mr Gerhard Schroder, backed the deployment decided by Chancellor Helmut Kohl before he lost the September 27th election.
Mr Schroder's Social Democrats are negotiating to form a government with the Greens, some of whom remained true in the vote to their pacifist, anti-NATO roots.
The motion was approved by 500 to 62 votes with 18 abstentions, the parliamentary press office said after amending the figures slightly. Earlier it had said the vote was 503 to 63 with 18 abstentions. The SPD and Greens were allowed a free vote.
The vast majority of SPD deputies, 198, voted in favour of the motion, 21 were against and seven abstained. Mr Schroder, not a member of the outgoing parliament, did not vote.
Dr Kohl offered NATO 500 soldiers and 14 Tornado planes for strikes if Yugoslavia breaks its promise to end its military crackdown in Kosovo. The deployment of German forces could not take place without parliamentary approval.
The leader of the Greens, Mr Joschka Fischer, who is likely to become foreign minister in the Schroder government, said he doubted if NATO's military threat was legal without a mandate from the UN Security Council. But he said maintaining pressure on Mr Milosevic was crucial.
"If the international community had not piled on the pressure, there would be many more innocent victims, among the Kosovo Albanians mostly. We would at best have another Bosnia and at worse a great war," he said.
"We must not allow this in Europe if we learn from our history in the bloody first half of this century."
The Kosovo Albanian Committee for Human Rights announced that 1,645 ethnic Albanians, among them 174 women and 152 children, had been killed in the fighting in the province.
Of those killed since the start of this year, 338 were over the age of 55, the committee said.
It added that 408 of the dead had not been identified.
The committee said that 1,300 people, among them 45 Serbs, had been "kidnapped".