The breakaway province of Kosovo will declare independence from Serbia well before May, a government spokesman said Monday.

Kosovo is expected to announce early in 2008 that it will formally break away from Serbia, but has vowed not to do so without EU and U.S. approval.

"Kosovo will look at its own agenda, but it will certainly be much earlier than May," spokesman Skender Hyseni told The Associated Press after a meeting of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian leadership Officials said a declaration of independence is expected sometime in January or February. That would start a 120-day internationally supervised transition, during which the U.S. and other countries would recognize the new state and the U.N. would hand off administration to the EU.

It remained unclear whether the province's leaders would wait until after Serbian presidential elections tentatively set for Jan. 20.

Hyseni said Kosovo "is only going to follow its own roadmap" and would not be pressured into putting off a declaration solely because of the Serbian vote.

Although the province formally remains part of Serbia, it has been run by the U.N. and NATO since 1999, when NATO airstrikes ended a Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists. Serbia has offered Kosovo broad autonomy but insists it remain part of Serbian territory, and Russia has threatened to block its independence drive at the U.N. Security Council.

On Friday, a "troika" of envoys from the EU, U.S. and Russia reported back to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that four months of internationally mediated talks had ended in a stalemate.

The Security Council is set to take up the issue on Dec. 19.

The U.S. and most EU countries have signaled they will recognize an independent Kosovo, but Cyprus has refused, fearing it would set a bad precedent by encouraging separatist movements elsewhere in Europe and worldwide.

Russia sides with Serbia in opposing an independent Kosovo. On Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that a unilateral declaration of independence would have repercussions across the region.

Any country recognizing such a declaration of independence would be "violating international law," Lavrov said during a visit to Cyprus.

"I would like to stress that in the event that Kosovo unilaterally declares independence and that independence is recognized, this will not be without consequences," he added.

"This will trigger a chain reaction in the Balkans and in other areas of the world."

Kosovo's outgoing prime minister, meanwhile, urged the EU on Monday to bring the province's eight-year quest for statehood to a quick conclusion.

The EU must "recognize the need for immediate and permanent conclusion of this process," Agim Ceku told the AP in an interview as foreign ministers of the 27-nation bloc discussed the crisis in Brussels, Belgium.

From NPR reports and The Associated Press