(Refiles to delete mention of Russia in 2nd paragraph)
By Matt Robinson
OHRID, Macedonia, April 20 (Reuters) - Serbia's president on Friday rejected Western warnings that Kosovo would descend into violence if it did not get independence soon and pressed for more talks on the province's fate.
President Boris Tadic clashed with his Albanian counterpart on the future of Serbia's breakaway southern province at an energy conference in the Macedonian lakeside resort of Ohrid.
Tadic accused U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari of using the threat of violence by the ethnic Albanian majority against Kosovo's 100,000 remaining Serbs as a key argument in favour of his plan for independence supervised by the European Union.
"If the threat to the status of Serbs and their safety is not an argument for more negotiations but an argument for an independent Kosovo, then I reject that kind of argument in the strongest possible terms," he told a news conference.
He said he had heard from Ahtisaari that this was the "key argument" for independence.
Violence, he said, "cannot be an argument for anything."
Ahtisaari warned this week in Helsinki that the majority Albanian province might become ungovernable if the U.N. Security Council alters or rejects his blueprint.
Without clarity, he said, the situation would become "difficult to handle." His comments echoed warnings from the United States and the European Union that violence was likely without U.N. endorsement of the plan by the summer.
In Kosovo, Prime Minister Agim Ceku said independence would come "by the end of May". He rejected further talks, and was backed by Albanian President Alfred Moisiu in Ohrid who said the Serbian request was "just to postpone the decision".
The province of 2 million people -- 90 percent of whose people are ethnic Albanian -- has been run by the United Nations since 1999, when NATO bombs drove out Serb forces guilty of civilian killings and expulsions in a two-year war with separatist Albanian rebels.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Belgrade on Thursday backed a Serbian call for more negotiations. The West says Ahtisaari exhausted all chances of compromise over 13 months of talks that ended in March.
At Russia's behest, a Security Council fact-finding team will visit Belgrade and Pristina next week to see the situation first hand.
Washington -- with over 1,000 troops in the 16,500-strong NATO-led peace force in Kosovo -- says it will propose a new U.N. resolution within weeks, but has yet to win over Moscow.
