EU foreign ministers will meet to discuss the future of Kosovo, as the UN's deadline for an agreement on the province's final status arrives.

Kosovo is still a province of Serbia, but ethnic Albanian leaders there have threatened to declare independence unilaterally after the deadline passes.

Nato - fearing a violent Serb reaction - has said it will keep 16,000 troops in Kosovo to deter any clashes.

Ministers will also discuss Iran, in preparation for this week's EU summit.

EU divided

The EU mediator on Kosovo, Wolfgang Ischinger, will brief the foreign ministers ahead of Friday's summit meeting in Brussels.

Member states are divided over whether to recognise a Kosovan declaration of independence, correspondents say.

Foreign ministers from Britain, Germany, France and Italy wrote to their EU counterparts on Friday urging them to honour their commitments to Kosovo, although the letter stopped short of unequivocal support for Kosovan independence.

Some EU countries have separatist movements of their own and fear that recognising Kosovan independence would set a dangerous precedent.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon set a deadline of 10 December for mediators from the "troika" of the EU, US and Russia to broker a deal between Kosovo and Serbia, but the talks failed:

"After 120 days of intensive negotiations, the parties were unable to reach an agreement on Kosovo's status," the troika said in the report, obtained by the BBC.

"Neither party was willing to concede its position on the fundamental question of sovereignty on Kosovo," the report concludes.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has reiterated Moscow's demand for negotiations to continue beyond Monday.

Speaking in Brussels on Friday, Mr Lavrov said Serbia had "presented a whole series of specific proposals, compromise proposals" which merited further negotiations on Kosovo's status.

Risk of flare-up

The UN's top administrator in Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, has put forward a plan offering Kosovo "supervised independence".

The plan - accepted by the ethnic Albanians - would mean international agencies gradually steer Kosovo's institutions towards independence, while safeguarding the rights and property of the Serb minority.

But Serbia has rejected the plan, fearing discrimination against ethnic Serbs would go unpunished in an independent Kosovo.

Nato was criticised after it failed to prevent riots by ethnic Albanians in 2004 in which Serbs were attacked. Nineteen people died in the violence.

Though technically part of Serbia, Kosovo has been administered by the UN for the last eight years.

Belgrade's security forces were driven out of Kosovo by a Nato bombing campaign in 1999, launched to stop a violent Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians.

Iran sanctions

EU foreign ministers will also discuss Iran's controversial nuclear programme in their meeting.

They will be briefed by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana on the failure of his attempts to persuade Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment programme.

Britain and France, in alliance with the US, want to push the UN to impose a third round of sanctions on Iran for its unwillingness to comply with international demands.

PHOTO CAPTION

A KFOR vehicle passes by a barb wire near the main bridge in the ethnically divided Kosovo town of Mitrovica December 9, 2007. [Reuters]

BBC