(Adds comments from French diplomatic source) By Douglas Hamilton BELGRADE, June 12 (Reuters) - Serbia will never surrender Kosovo to the breakaway province's ethnic Albanian majority or trade its territory for European Union or NATO membership, Serb leaders said on Tuesday. Serbia "will give up neither Kosovo nor its European future", President Boris Tadic said in a statement which rejected "any compensation for lost territory". "It would be damaging if any country recognised the independence of Kosovo without a proper decision by the Security Council", he said. The statement was softer in tone but much the same in substance as a vow by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica. On Monday, he said U.S. President George W. Bush had "disgusted" Serbs by promising independence to Kosovo and would not be forgiven. Kostunica said on Tuesday taking land from a sovereign state "in return for the offer of a bright future" was unacceptable. The row deepened as Kosovo marked the 8th anniversary of the deployment of 60,000 NATO troops. NATO bombed Serbia for 11 weeks in 1999 to compel it to withdraw forces who had killed some 10,000 Albanian civilians in a counter-insurgency conflict. Speaking in Paris, U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said Western allies looked certain to press ahead with a plan drawn up by U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari to provide a platform for Kosovo independence. "Serbia needs to get beyond Kosovo. It lost Kosovo ... I don't believe you can turn the clock back. So independence is our objective and I believe we can get there," Burns told reporters ahead of a meeting with top diplomats from Europe and the United States. "It (the Ahtisaari plan) is the only way forward and there is no walking back from it in our judgment." Speaking after the meeting, a French diplomatic source said: "They confirmed they wanted to continue the negotiations at the Security Council without delay to lead to a resolution allowing the propositions of Mr. Ahtisaari to be put in place." MOSCOW OR BRUSSELS? The dispute over Kosovo's independence has turned into a diplomatic standoff between Russia and the West. Western hopes that pro-Western Tadic would be more amenable than Kostunica to the West's wish to grant statehood to Kosovo's 90 percent ethnic Albanian evaporated on May 15 after he and Kostunica sealed a coalition pact and closed ranks on the issue. In a desperate bid to head off the loss of 15 percent of its territory, Serbia relies heavily on Russia, which has made plain it may veto a U.N. resolution that Serbia does not support. That reliance on Moscow sits awkwardly with Serbia's bid for EU membership, the prime goal of Tadic's Democratic Party. Kosovo's 2 million Albanians would make up 22 percent of Serbia's population if they stayed. No one has come up with a plan to persuade or force them to do that. They were not invited to vote in Serbia's last several elections, which they ignored, and Kostunica's offer of "full autonomy" foresees no role for them in the Serbian parliament. Diplomats say the West may take Kosovo to a Security Council vote this month, daring Moscow to veto. Serbia's Minister for Kosovo Slobodan Samardzic said Belgrade would immediately "annul" any unilateral declaration of independence. "We warn of a terrible precedent ... when the entire edifice of the international legal system would collapse like dominoes, and consequences would be awful," he said. NATO and the United Nations are braced for huge protests and possible violence in Kosovo if Russia vetoes an independence resolution. (Additional reporting by Ivana Sekularac and Fatos Bytyci, Crispian Balmer and Anna Willard)
