The European Union suspended talks with Serbia over closer co-operation yesterday in protest at attacks on embassies in Belgrade by protesters angry at the declaration of independence by Kosovo.

The US Embassy was gutted by fire on Thursday night and the offices of several European countries were also attacked. The British Embassy was damaged but not invaded in a night of rioting and looting in the Serbian capital that left one protester dead in the burnt-out US embassy building.

Yesterday the US Ambassador ordered the evacuation of non-essential personnel from Belgrade while in the northern Kosovan city of Mitrovica a mob of 5,000 protesters attacked UN troops guarding the bridge linking the Serb and ethnic Albanian communities.

Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, urged Serbia to do more to protect embassies after the German consulate was also damaged. “The embassies have to be protected - that is the obligation of a country,” he said, adding that the EU would wait before resuming talks on the signing of the Stabilisation and Association Agreement, the precursor to full membership talks.

Violence flared in response to the recognition by the US, Britain, Germany and other EU nations of the independence declaration by the Serbian province of Kosovo, an area under Nato supervision since 1999 and regarded by Serbs as the cradle of their nation.

Russia, a staunch ally of Serbia, was accused by the US of behaving mostly unhelpfully towards the tense situation in the Balkans, where other American embassies were on high alert. Nicholas Burns, a senior US diplomat, said: “They are not doing anything to help the Kosovars. So they are kind of on the sidelines contributing mostly unhelpfully.”

His remarks followed a warning from Dmitri Rogozin, the outspoken Russian Ambassador to Nato, that his country may resort to “brute military force” to assert its authority in the region. “If the European Union works out a single position and Nato goes beyond its current mandate in Kosovo, these organisations will conflict with the United Nations,” Mr Rogozin said.

“And we, I think, will proceed from an assumption that to be respected, we have to use brute military force.”

Boris Tadic, the pro-West Serbian President, called an emergency session of his National Security Council yesterday. “I condemn in the strongest terms the violence, looting and burning that happened in Belgrade's streets, in which one life was lost,” he said. “There is no excuse for violence. No one can excuse with a single word what happened yesterday. This was not Serbia and Serbia will never be like that.”

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