The UN Security Council has supported a plan for the deployment of the EULEX mission in Kosovo.

Belgrade is happy, since the planned deployment is ‘status neutral’, ie it does not give in principle (and practice?) any encouragement to the idea that Kosovo is now independent.

Which is why various international media outlets are writing this up as a Serb victory.

In short, this centuries-long Balkan zero-sum negotiation inches in to a new phase, with ‘Albanian’ Kosovo having one set of formalised structure and loyalties and ‘Serbian’ Kosovo another set.

Let’s recall this:

Serbia’s former Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic in 2000 told me how an elderly Albanian in southern Serbia had put it to him straight:

“Mr Covic, you have two children. I have six.

I am prepared to sacrifice two of my children to the cause. How many of yours are you prepared to sacrifice?” 

Perhaps the point now is that while Milosevic was around the Albanians could dominate the immediate battlefield by delivering greater density and intensity of Force and Will in Kosovo itself.

Now they see a perverse consequence of their own success.

Having achieved an historic lurch in favour of independence and eventual EU membership, the Kosovars see the struggle switching to a different part of the battlefield where Serbia has some advantages, namely international diplomacy.

The other day I listened to a senior UK Balkan expert passionately defending Kosovo independence on the grounds that ‘these days borders must be based on consent’.

Even if that proposition is true, which it mainly isn’t, it does not help much when almost every Serb in Kosovo does not express ‘consent’ to Albanian rule.

Hence this UN compromise which in a messy way keeps both the UN and EU in different parts of Kosovo under varying mandates.

No surprise that some Kosovo Albanians are annoyed at the way things are going?