The UN Security Council will decide whether to give Kosovo independence from Serbia, after UN envoy Mr Martti Ahtisaari yesterday declared an end to over a year of fruitless Serb-Albanian talks.
Mr Ahtisaari said leaders of Serbia and Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority were still deadlocked over the fate of the UN-run territory after a meeting in Vienna, the last in a mediation process that began in February 2006.
If the UN Security Council adopts his blueprint, Kosovo will declare itself Europe's newest independent state and the last to be carved from the former Yugoslavia.
"I would have very much preferred that this process would lead to a negotiated solution," the former Finnish president told a news conference. "But it has left my in no doubt that the parties' stands ... do not contain any common ground to reach such an agreement."
"It is my intention to finalize the proposal for submission to the Security Council in the course of this month."
Kosovo has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombed Serbia to drive Serb forces accused of atrocities in a two-year counter-insurgency war out of the province. Some 10,000 Albanians died and almost a million fled before NATO troops occupied Kosovo.