After an estimated 10,000 civilian deaths, 38,000 Nato combat sorties, seven years of United Nations administration and fifteen months of intensive diplomacy, a final report is being delivered to the UN Secretary-General this weekend on progress towards resolving the incendiary question of Kosovo. The situation can be summarised in one word: deadlock. The Kosovans' ethnic Albanian leaders, emboldened by staunch US backing, demand full independence under a UN plan that purports to guarantee protection of the 100,000 Serbs who would be left in enclaves in the new country. Serbia, which considers Russia “one of the pillars of our foreign policy”, refuses to contemplate losing a territory it has claimed, on and off, since 1389. Yet this deadlock must end soon. Adroitly handled, the process could accelerate Serbia's and Kosovo's trajectories towards EU membership. Mistakes, as a senior Serbian politician hinted on Thursday, could lead the Balkans back to war.

Ban Ki Moon, the seemingly mediocre UN Secretary-General, will be briefed on a strategy for supervising a transition to Kosovan independence over Serbian and Russian objections. This strategy is far from perfect. At its heart is a plan drafted by Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish President, that effectively grants self-determination to Kosovo's Muslim majority but denies it to its Serbs. Its promises of protection from the risk of sectarian violence and expropriation are undermined by the experience of many Serbs forced to flee rioting in the enclaves in 2004. And its promise of statehood to the Albanian Kosovans — a former ethnic minority within Yugoslavia — has alarmed those EU members, including Spain, Slovakia, Romania and Greece, who fear it will encourage their own secessionists.

Despite these flaws, the Ahtisaari plan is the least bad option if a return to conflict is to be avoided. Inaction, as Kosovo's new Prime Minister has made clear, would lead quickly to a unilateral declaration of independence without UN or EU supervision. Serbian secession, at least north of Mitrovica and the Ibar river, would be inevitable and probably violent. The only other conceivable strategy — Kosovo's partition on ethnic lines — could trigger similar demands from Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina and risk unravelling the still-fragile accords that ended that country's civil war.

Kosovan independence is therefore the only realistic basis for long-term stability in the region. But to achieve it peacefully the EU must show itself unafraid of Russian bluster and undistracted by the qualms of those who fear the Kosovan precedent. It must remind those members that Kosovo is a special case, from which Slobodan Milosevic was bent on driving its Albanian majority until the air war of 1999. It must demonstrate, with Nato, that it is serious about the Ahtisaari protections for minority Serbs, not only when the plan is fully enforced but in the crucial transition period leading to it. And it must make clear to Kosovo's Albanians that any hope of eventual EU membership is conditional on absolute respect for their existing borders. As the dream of Kosovan independence becomes reality, any dreams of a Greater Albania must die.

The stakes are high in Kosovo because Russia is using the issue to show off its resurgent strength. Independence is still the right outcome. If necessary Moscow must be defied to achieve it.