BRUSSELS/BELGRADE - Serbia warned the EU on Wednesday it would not accept any decision on Kosovo taken outside the United Nations, and its ally Russia told the United States to stop backing Kosovo independence while talks continue.
Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, Russia's envoy in a troika with the European Union and the United States supervising Serb-Kosovo Albanian talks, accused Washington of bad faith for declaring support for Kosovo independence to occur later this year.
"I absolutely do not support that kind of attitude and those messages from the United States. I didn't expect that from the United States at the very moment negotiations began," he was quoted as saying by Serbia's daily Vecernje Novosti.
Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica also called on the West not to encourage the breakaway province to declare independence and said Belgrade was being constructive in negotiations to resolve Kosovo's future by Dec. 10.
He gave no hint of any progress in the talks.
"We do think that the United Nations and the Security Council are the sole institutions in which the problem of the future status of Kosovo should be dealt with," he said after talks in Brussels with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
"Everything else is a sort of violation of international law."
Efforts to win a Security Council resolution rubber-stamping a U.N. plan to put Kosovo on the road to independence broke down this year after Russia threatened to veto any such resolution.
Moscow insists any pact on the province, administered by the United Nations since a 1999 NATO bombing campaign to drive out Serb forces, must not be imposed on Belgrade.
Leaders of Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanians say they will declare independence unilaterally if internationally mediated talks which began in Vienna last month do not yield anything and have called on the United States and EU to back them.
