The month of January 1993 was at last spent in face to face negotiations for much of the time between all three parties to the dispute in Geneva with intense diplomacy within the region. President Milosevic, newly re-elected President of Serbia, began to play a larger role in the negotiations and President Cosic's influence decreased. Croatian early acceptance of VOPP was, on balance, helpful but owed everything to President Tudjman's belief that his prime responsibility lay in defeating the Serbs in Croatia itself and that appearing reasonable to the international community over Bosnia- Herzegovina gave him more scope to take a hard line in Croatia. This did not, however, stop Croatian ethnic cleansing in provinces they were likely to be in or close to a majority.

President Izetbegovic faced at this time powerful dissent in Sarajevo over any settlement, helped by the equivocation of the incoming US Administration. President Izetbegovic did what he was an expert at, namely to play for time, and focused his attention on Washington where he sensed he could call on support for changing the map in order to control more territory, a stance, which given the intransigence of the Bosnian Serbs and the amount of territory they held, was a perfectly reasonable position though it ignored the very substantial Bosnian Serb roll back demanded by the VOPP.

Eventually the Co-Chairmen concluded that the remaining outstanding issues had to be placed firmly on the agenda of the Security Council in New York and not let President Clinton's new Administration kill off the VOPP by anonymous briefings out of Washington with the whole UN/EU ICFY diplomacy being sidelined in Geneva.