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BRUSSELS-Russia told the US on Wednesday to stop backing Kosovo independence while talks continue, and Serbia warned the EU on Wednesday that it would not accept any decision on Kosovo made outside the UN.Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, Russia’s envoy in the so-called Troika with the EU and the US supervising the Kosovo 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 US. I didn’t expect that from the US 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 UN 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 the EU’s 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 UN plan to put Kosovo on the road to independence broke down this year after Russia threatened to veto any such resolution.Moscow insists that any pact on the province must not be imposed on Belgrade.Leaders of Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanians say they will declare independence unilaterally if internationally mediated talks that began in Vienna last month do not yield anything.
As in the days of Noah...
