The Serbian parliament on Wednesday voted down a UN proposal to grant independence to Kosovo, all but leaving the province's future up to the UN Security Council, though a formal round of negotiations is still scheduled for late February in Vienna.

The 250-member parliament voted 225-15 to reject the plan, saying it "breaches fundamental principles of international law" and "illegally lays the foundation for the creation of a new independent state on the territory of Serbia." There were four abstentions and another six parliamentarians were absent from the vote.

Martti Ahtisaari, the UN senior envoy who drafted the proposal, told the Associated Press on Thursday that it was now "highly unlikely" that Serbia would reach a compromise with Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority in talks that were set to end in Vienna on February 21. Kosovo leaders believe the fate of the province can still be settled to their satisfaction by the UN Security Council.

The breakaway province has been run by the UN since mid-1999, when NATO's air war stopped a Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists. Kosovo Albanians largely support the UN proposal, which stops short of full independence on paper but lays out a plan for provincial self-rule, including an army and a constitution. But their leaders don't seem terribly concerned about the parliamentary vote. Serbian attitudes toward independence, said Kosovo's Prime Minister Agim Ceku, were not important. "What matters is what the European Union and the international community are saying, and not what Belgrade is saying," Ceku said, according to AP.

Now the UN Security Council may wind up imposing a solution, since tensions between Serbians and Kosovars are still so high. But there's also an uneasy relationshiop between the UN and the fraction of Kosovars unsatisfied with the world body's proposal. On Saturday 3,000 Albanian protesters broke through a security line and tried to march on a government building in the provincial capital, Pristina, to show their opposition to the UN plan. When UN and Kosovar police clashed with the protesters, firing rubber bullets and tear gas, two ethnic Albanians were killed. The unrest prompted Kosovo's Interior Minister, Fatmir Rexhepi, to resign on Monday, followed by a resignation on Wednesday by the UN's chief police commissioner in Kosovo.