All eyes on Russia as U.N. Security Council takes up Kosovo

After some 18 months of talks, countless missions, painstaking mapmaking, hand-holding, and hand-wringing – the sticky situation of Kosovo's status will be taken up by the United Nations Security Council Wednesday.

The meeting, to take place in private, constitutes the first test at the highest level of diplomacy of whether Russia intends to make independence for the Serb province a difficult if not nasty process for the West.

Russia has loudly backed Belgrade's desire to retain Kosovo and says it will veto Kosovo independence in the Security Council – despite what US officials privately say was a prior "understanding."

"What's happening [on Kosovo] is an extension of two wars," says Marshall Harris, a former US diplomat and adviser to the president of Kosovo. "The first is the Milosevic wars in the Balkans ... and the second is the cold war. The independence of Kosovo needs to happen for this reason. You can't reintegrate Kosovo into Serbia. The Security Council meeting may reveal what Russia's bottom line will be."

The dispute deeply worries European leaders, though it appears they plan to move on independence even without Security Council authorization. Days ago, at a key meeting in at a key meeting in Brussels, the European Union (EU) decided to send 1,800 police and civil administrators to Kosovo after the New Year. "The Kosovars and Serbs no longer want to live together," said French President Nicolas Sarkozy after the meeting. "Our goal is that Europe does not explode."

Kosovo is also a major test for European unity, experts say, and for transatlantic resolve at a time when Moscow appears to be shaking it. It has been eight years since the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia, the first military action designated as "humanitarian" – to stop a bloody "Greater Serbia" program that spread throughout the former Yugoslavia, ending with Western intervention. At the time, NATO and Russian troops faced off at the airport in Pristina in a brief crisis that lasted a day.

Today, a different kind of Kosovo standoff appears likely, though its severity is unclear.

"This is an important moment," says François Heisbourg, special adviser to the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. "The manner in which Kosovo is resolved will shape EU-Russian relations. The Europeans think Kosovo is of vital importance. We are the ones who must deal with it. Unless Russia changes course, we are 180 degrees apart from them."

Russian president Vladimir Putin could engineer moves that range from irritating to destabilizing, experts say. Moscow could declare Kosovo independence illegal, or recognize a potential independence declaration by Serbs in the flash-point Kosovo city of Mitrovica. Russia could also start to aid and comfort Serbs in a way that would restart a cold-war standoff.

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