A new step in the Serbia/Kosovo story: the UN General Assembly has passed a unanimous resolution whose sense is to open ‘dialogue’ between Belgrade and Pristina supported by the European Union.

Note that the BBC can not even get the simplest facts right. Its report says that:

The European Union and the United States have already recognised Kosovo’s independence.

Budala! First, the EU does not recognise anyone. Second, several EU member states have not recognised Kosovo – that’s part of the point.

Thus it looks as if (for now) the Kosovo issue is shifting in official Belgrade eyes from being a Problem to being a Fact of Life. The UN resolution blandly ignores all the arguments to and fro, notes the ICJ judgement and encourages Belgrade and Pristina to be nice about the whole thing.

Diplomacy in action. Sometimes the best thing to do is to stop brooding on a problem and set up prosaic processes aimed at patiently building common ground instead.

Note that, credit being given where it is due, the European Union (energetically supported or indeed led by bilateral diplomacy from UK, Germany and other member states – well done William Hague) emerges rather elegantly from this one too. The new process set to emerge allows the EU’s own embarrassing divisions on the Kosovo issue to be subsumed in … dialogue. What else?

All those other countries led by Russia who have supported Serbia too will be more or less content. No one loses anything by talking!

Moscow no doubt will be struck by the fact that in this case Belgrade has changed course under intense pressure from Brussels, London and Berlin. But does Russia really care where all those puny Balkan borders lie? No. And, of course, Russia has done very well from the West’s bungling over Kosovo by pocketing some precedents for its ‘near abroad’, namely the so-called independence of Abkhazia and S Ossetia.

What in the end will Belgrade and Pristina discuss? How about cutting a Big Deal? Let’s swap some land to tidy the map in a way which allows Serbia to recognise Kosovo with eveeryone’s honour ostensibly intact?

I can not see any realistic outcome short of that, which has some merits of its own anyway.

More importantly, clever people like the International Crisis Group are now thinking the same – and urging the ‘international community’ not to make footling difficulties:

The most controversial outcome that might emerge from negotiations would be a Northern Kosovo-Preševo Valley swap in the context of mutual recognition and settlement of all other major issues. Neither Pristina nor Belgrade proposes this openly, but officials in both capitals have begun to speak of it quietly in contacts with Crisis Group.

Many in the international community would be unhappy with this option. Crisis Group believes that ruling out this or any specific mutually-agreed option from the onset, however, would risk freezing the Kosovo-Serbia conflict, with no guarantee of eventual resolution.

Exactly. The locals have to live with the outcome, not us.

Nice technique by all concerned.