Russia will accept a partition of Serbia's Kosovo province if that is the solution agreed by Belgrade and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Friday.
Asked if Russia would agree to partition, Lavrov said: "Negotiations are continuing with the mediation of the troika of Russia, the European Union and the United States. The aim is to help the sides reach an agreement, and we will support whatever it is on which they reach agreement."
The province, part of Serbia but with a majority ethnic Albanian population, has been run by the United Nations and Nato for the past eight years. Kosovo Albanians want full independence, but Belgrade has refused to give them that. The UN administration agreed with the leaders of the Albanian majority to hold parliamentary and local elections on November 17, officials said.
The vote is likely to increase tension because the talks over Kosovo's political future are due to end in early December. Russia, a Serbian ally, opposes a Western-backed plan to grant Kosovo independence from Belgrade. The troika format was created after Moscow had blocked the independence plan in the United Nations. "The aim of the (troika) mediators is to help the sides to reach agreement .... and not to force a particular solution on them," Lavrov told reporters at a news briefing in Moscow.
Partition of Kosovo would most likely involve splitting off a northern slice of the province where a large part of the ethnic Serbian minority live. Wolfgang Ischinger, the EU's mediator to the troika, speaking at the opening of a fresh round of talks in Vienna on Thursday, said partition has never been on the troika's agenda. Earlier this month though, Ischinger had said a partition could be contemplated if both sides agreed to it.
Kosovo Albanians have said if there is no deal agreed on the province's future status, they will declare independence unilaterally. That would present European states with the dilemma of whether to recognise Kosovo as a sovereign state.
In an interview published on Friday in Der Standard newspaper Ischinger said an agreed deal would be "a thousand times better than any unilateral solution". "But realistically the chances of achieving this after all that has happened are rather slim," he said. "It would be a disaster if we allow this issue to divide," he said.
In Kosovo's capital Pristina, Prime Minister Agim Ceku said he still hoped to achieve independence by the end of the year. "We are ready, in the absence of a UN Security Council resolution ....to declare independence and ask for recognition by the EU and the United States," he said.