There was no targeting of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade—it was a huge and terrible mistake, and expressions of regret have been made by NATO and other Governments. However, given that some 18,000 sorties—6,000 of them strike sorties—have taken place, the few mistakes that have been made, every one of which is bitterly regretted, have to be seen in proportion.

I do not believe that we have made it impossible to get a Security Council resolution when a settlement has been reached, and that would clearly be our objective when it came to putting our forces or any other forces that were required into Kosovo. In the short term, that task has been made more difficult, but no interest of either China or Russia is served by allowing Milosevic to get away with the sort of ethnic cleansing that he has been carrying out until now. When I stood yesterday at the newly erected memorial to the 27 million citizens of the then Soviet Union who died in the second world war, the Russian ambassador made it clear that the diplomatic track had to go on and that those efforts should be intensified. I am sure that my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary will express the same message when he makes his statement on Kosovo later this afternoon.