Swedish PM sees Kosovo move after Serb polls

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said on Thursday he expected Kosovo's status to be resolved after a Serbian presidential election in late January, joining others in the West to favor that timeframe.

Belgrade announced on Wednesday it would hold an election on January 20 with a likely second round on February 3. Western diplomats have been urging ethnic Albanian leaders of the Serb province to hold back from any independence declaration till after the vote.

"The most important thing is to stand together and probably also to wait for the Serb presidential elections," Reinfeldt told reporters as he arrived for a meeting of conservative European leaders on the eve of an EU summit.

EU officials fear hardline Serb nationalists will get a poll boost if Kosovo secedes before the vote. Hardliners argue Serbia should turn its back on the EU and NATO and forge new ties with Russia, which has joined it in opposing Kosovo independence.

Kosovo's overwhelming Albanian majority wants independence but Belgrade has insisted the breakaway province, under U.N. administration since a 1999 NATO air war to drive out Serbian forces, may only have broad autonomy within Serbia.

Participants at a meeting of liberal EU lawmakers on Tuesday said EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn told the meeting he had received assurances from Kosovo Prime Minister-designate Hashim Thaci that he would not make a declaration before April and would coordinate the move with Western countries.

In remarks published on Thursday, Rehn said he expected Kosovo's status to be resolved in winter or early spring.

The Finnish newspaper Uutispaiva Demari acknowledged it had misquoted Rehn as saying Kosovo's final status had been "postponed until early spring".

A spokeswoman for Rehn said he had said in the interview conducted in Finnish on Tuesday: "The Kosovo status settlement will be finalized in the course of the winter (talvi) or spring-winter (kevattalvi)." The term "kevattalvi" usually refers to March.

EU foreign ministers are due to hold a key meeting in Slovenia on March 28-29 about integrating the Western Balkans into Europe.

The Serbian election will determine whether pro-European liberal reformer Boris Tadic is re-elected or power shifts to the hardline nationalist Radical party, whose leader is on trial at the Hague U.N. war crimes tribunal.

Kosovo's backers say independence is the only option.

"It is the only solution that provides peace and stability in the region. EU leaders are getting together and this is of fundamental importance for the region," Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha told reporters before the same meeting.

"Serbia should understand it cannot progress and persist as a colonial power in the region. Kosovo is a European matter."

EU diplomats said the 27-nation bloc's foreign ministers agreed informally this week that if the date of the Serbian election was officially confirmed, they would avoid early action that could fuel a nationalist backlash.

Kosovo will top the foreign policy agenda of the Brussels summit. EU leaders are set to agree that years of international efforts to reach a compromise between Belgrade and Pristina on its future ended were exhausted by a December 10 mediation deadline.

Diplomats said the EU was moving towards an agreement early next year to deploy over 1,600 police and justice officials to supervise the rule of law in Kosovo but several EU states still had misgivings about recognizing independence without a U.N. Security Council resolution.

(Additional reporting by Terhi Kinnunen and Paul Taylor, writing by Mark John; editing by Sami Aboudi)