Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said that Serbia would like Russia to play a more active role in resolving the Kosovo issue.

“We must consult with Russia,” Dacic said, referring to the failed EU-mediated talks on the former province, which Serbia refuses to recognize as an independent country.

According to him, Serbia should not take any more sudden moves that would have repercussions, such as the earlier decision to transfer talks on Kosovo from the UN level to the EU one.

“The talks were transferred to the EU, and now Serbia calls on Russia to help get them back to the UN,” Dacic said in Moscow on Wednesday.

His Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, on Wednesday said that “Russia understood the importance of the Kosovo problems for its friends the Serbs. “We will always support the position formulated by Serbian officials,” Medvedev added.

Dacic’s visit to Moscow comes after Belgrade on Monday rejected an EU-mediated deal aimed at normalising relations with Kosovo, claiming that it did not safeguard the basic rights of the Serbian minority in Kosovo.

Reaching the deal was the EU’s main precondition for Serbia to get a start date for talks in June.

The visit also comes after Serbia’s Deputy Prime Minister, Aleksandar Vucic, expressed disappointment with German and French officials, who said that Serbia is unlikely to get the start date for talks.

After meeting parliamentarians from Germany and France he said that he had expected more support for Serbia’s EU accession.

“We’re not going to beg anyone, but we expect that these countries to show respect for Serbia,” he said on Wednesday, reiterating that Serbia could not sign the Kosovo deal without agreement on the basic rights and security for Serbs in northern Kosovo.

The EU-mediated dialogue was launched in March 2011, three years after Kosovo declared independence.

The aim was to normalise relations between the two capitals, both of which aspire to EU membership, in the context of Serbia’s continued refusal to recognise Kosovo’s independence.