By David Brunnstrom

BRUSSELS, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Kosovo Albanian leaders pledged on Monday to start talks with their Western backers immediately on a declaration of independence and the European Union moved closer to unanimous support for its drive to secede from Serbia.

With a United Nations deadline for agreement on the future of the breakaway province expiring on Monday, Russia said any unilateral recognition could trigger problems around the world and undermine international law.

"From today, Kosovo begins consultations with key international partners to coordinate the next steps to a declaration of independence," Skender Hyseni, spokesman of Kosovo's negotiating team with Serbia, said in Pristina.

"Kosovo and the people of Kosovo urgently need clarity on their future...The institutions of Kosovo will deliver that clarity very soon," he said. He said a declaration would come "much earlier than May", referring to one rumoured timeframe.

Serbia, firmly against independence, said only the United Nations had the authority to determine Kosovo's future.

"That process belongs to the U.N. Security Council and to all countries that are members of the U.N., not to the EU," Serb Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic said on the sidelines of a conference in Belgrade about EU accession.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt told reporters ahead of a European Union meeting on Kosovo that there was "virtual unity" on Kosovo within the bloc, whose internal divisions prevented it from halting the Balkans wars of the 1990s.

But the EU still lacks the full consensus which diplomats say would help to dissuade Serbia and Russia from any last-minute bid to derail the independence process.

"We are in support of a negotiated settlement... and we would not like to see anything undermining the international legal basis," Cypriot Foreign Minister Erato Kozakou Markoullis said in Brussels of its concerns about a unilateral declaration.

Slovakia, keen not to encourage separatist moves by its own Hungarian minority, also said it would find it hard to recognise an independent Kosovo but Foreign Minister Jan Kubis said the EU could still deploy a planned 1,600-strong police mission there.

"The legal ground is the 1244 resolution and that resolution is valid," he said of the existing U.N. resolution governing international action in Kosovo.

"CHAIN REACTION"

Russia, which backs Serbia's opposition to independence, warned of the potential fallout from a unilateral declaration.

"It will create a chain reaction throughout the Balkans and other areas of the world," its Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters in Nicosia after talks there.

"Nobody in the talks should be humiliated," said Sergei Yastrzhembsky, President Vladimir Putin's personal envoy for EU relations, told reporters during a conference in Slovenia.

"The solution must never undermine international law."

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said independence moves should wait until after Serb polls in January. EU's chief Kosovo mediator urged Pristina to coordinate with Brussels.

Major powers in the Security Council are to debate Kosovo on Dec. 19, but Moscow has said it will call for more negotiations -- something Washington and most EU states think is pointless.

Cyprus and to a lesser extent Greece have led a group of doubters concerned either because of their proximity to the Balkans or because of separatist movements on their territory.

In a report to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last Friday, mediators from the United States, the European Union and Russia said four months of talks had found no compromise on whether Kosovo should be independent or just autonomous.

CONTINGENCY PLANS

Kosovo has been in legal limbo under U.N. administration since NATO bombing in 1999 pushed out Serbian forces to end ethnic cleansing against ethnic Albanians.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told BBC radio NATO might have to reinforce its 16,000-strong KFOR peace force to deal with any outbreaks of violence if tensions spiked between Kosovo's 90 percent ethnic Albanians and its Serb minority.

Leaders of the 27-nation EU are expected to declare at a summit on Friday that negotiations have been exhausted and that the future of both Serbia and Kosovo lies in the EU.

The plan is for the EU to take over police and justice tasks from the United Nations and appoint a civilian representative in a supervisory role, while NATO troops remain in place.

(Writing by Mark John; additional reporting by correspondents in Pristina, Nicosia, Belgrade, Moscow, United Nations, London, Paris and Ostrava; editing by Paul Taylor and Tim Heritage)

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