Five Ethnic Albanians, including two children, were found shot dead beside their tractor in Kosovo yesterday. This casts a shadow over the West's latest attempt to find a peace solution - a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels.
International observers say the five were killed by automatic fire in the western village of Rakovina, an area that has seen frequent clashes between rebels and government forces.
The killings were discovered as a week of international meetings on Kosovo got underway with a summit of EU foreign ministers.
But there is evidence that the West's view of the war in Kosovo is departing from the reality of the war on the ground. Western officials have oscillated in previous months between hope and despair.
Two weeks ago the head of monitors, Mr William Walker, said a prisoner exchange heralded a new mood of conciliation between Serbia and the ethnic Albanian separatists of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Ten days ago he agonised over how much the killing of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians would damage the peace process.
Last October, NATO threatened to bomb the Serbs if they went back to war.
Last week, after the Serbs had done just that, NATO backed down. Now, journalists are being told the Western alliance is again considering air strikes.
In fact, say military monitors in Kosovo, the war on the ground has followed a less frenetic pattern. Last October both sides pulled back troops less because of NATO threats than because, with leaves falling from the trees and snow arriving, more fighting was impossible.
This month, the war has started up again not because of new illwill, but because of an early thaw.
One senior commander with the Kosovo Liberation Army said: "The war goes on," he said. "We never stopped fighting, we only slowed down because now it is the winter."
Yesterday, the KLA's Podujevo brigade staged exercises around the muddy foothills of Shala Mountain, its base.
Troops in new quilted green combat jackets with machineguns and Motorolla radios ran and jumped through the mud, staging mock attacks for the cameras and appearing in high spirits. "We are getting ready," said one soldier. "We expect this war to go on for three years."
There is a similar pattern for the Serbs, who have recently put back tanks pulled out last October to guard key highways linking Pristina to Belgrade.
KLA units, reinforced and rearmed since last summer, now number at least 15,000 men and occupy large swathes of territory across Kosovo.
NATO's commander in chief, Gen Wesley Clark, has warned that full-scale war is likely to break out once warmer weather arrives.
Meanwhile, US envoy, Mr Chris Hill, returned to Kosovo to try for a third time to broker a peace plan, after two efforts earlier this winter were rejected by both Albanians and Serbs.
His new plan is believed to be similar to the previous two, offering a compromise to Serbia and to Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority in which the Albanians are given autonomy, but not independence.
"I think we are heading to a situation where we have to come up with some very good ideas," said Mr Hill after meeting with Mr Ibrahim Rugova, the senior ethnic Albanian politician. This week's meetings of European politicians and, later, Russia and America and then possibly all of them together as the International Contact Group, will determine how much, or how little, pressure the world is willing to bring to bear.
But with spring only a few weeks away, this pressure will have to be very great to stop the military juggernauts from colliding.
Growing violence in Kosovo could spark a "humanitarian catastrophe," the British Defence Secretary, Mr George Robertson, warned the House of Commons yesterday. He said there were no easy or glib solutions to the "infinitely complex" conflict between ethnic Albanians and Serbs.