Leaders hold fresh Kosovo talks

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Politicians from Kosovo and Belgrade are meeting international envoys in Austria to try to decide Kosovo's future before a December deadline.

Kosovo's ethnic Albanians say they will unilaterally declare independence if no deal is struck. Serbia opposes that.

The latest talks, involving envoys from the EU, US and Russia, were called after the failure of efforts to broker a deal at the UN Security Council.

The Serbian province of Kosovo has been run by the UN since a war in 1999.

Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority wants independence but its minority Serbs - and Belgrade - have rejected this.

The UN has administered Kosovo since a Nato air campaign drove out Serbia's security forces in 1999.

Nato's intervention was prompted by a Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians, some of whom had taken up arms.

Russian objections

The envoys from the EU, US and Russia - known as the troika - are expected to meet Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leaders on Thursday morning before talks with the Serbian delegation in the afternoon.

According to the BBC's Vienna correspondent, Bethany Bell, there is little hope of a breakthrough.

Kosovo Prime Minister Agim Ceku, one of the delegation members, told the AP news agency he wanted the talks to "open a way for us to declare independence".

If that does not happen, he said, "we have to declare and we are going to ask the international community to recognise us".

But Serbian President Boris Tadic has described independence for Kosovo as "unacceptable", and has called for a "compromise and a sustainable solution acceptable to both sides".

The Serb delegation has offered Kosovo "essential autonomy" that falls short of independence.

Russia's envoy to the talks, Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, told AP it was "wrong to expect that revolutionary ideas will immediately emerge" from Thursday's talks in Austria.

The troika took charge of the Kosovo negotiations after Russian objections scuppered efforts to put together a UN Security Council resolution on the province's future.

Russia, traditionally a supporter of Serbia, opposed a UN envoy's plan, tabled earlier this year, to offer Kosovo "supervised independence".

The UN has given the troika until 10 December to reach agreement but Russia has called for this deadline to be extended.