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I've written this reflection on Serbia's place in the world after last Sunday's elections for the World Service version of and it will be broadcast later today.

The stage is magnificent. A jumping riot of Technicolor neon dotted with the white silhouetted images of dancing girls. A singer is perched on a board carried by three muscled men. "Can we start?" she asks, "they are getting tired." The disembodied voice of the director booms back: "They are young, they are strong, they are Greek". But he relents and I get a preview of the catchy Greek entry to the Eurovision song contest.

I was watching the run-throughs for Eurovision in an auditorium in central Belgrade - as , Serbia gets to host the contest here in a couple of weeks' time. It seemed a good place to be the day after Serbia had, according to its president, , and rejected those parties which wanted Serbia to turn its face away from the West and towards Russia.

In fact, the result wasn't quite as conclusive as the president suggested hours after the polls had closed. About 48% of votes went to pro-European parties and about 48% for those which want to stop all talks until all EU countries declare Kosovo as part of Serbia, which is about as likely as Britain winning Eurovision.

The voice of the bodiless director booms out once more over the stage, "Bring on Russia". A young man in a white suit appears and croons a ballad while a dancer ice skates around him and another kicks a languid leg from the top of a short ladder. The symbolism is lost on me: perhaps "Better stuck at the top of a ladder than skating in ever decreasing circles on thin ice" is an old Russian proverb. Anyway their presence is a timely reminder that ambitious as the European Union is, Eurovision is even more expansive and inclusive.

The European Union certainly has what is known as enlargement fatigue, which sounds like a unfortunate side effect after taking those pills advertised in junk e-mails but is in fact a form of indigestion that the EU got after swallowing 10 new countries four years ago. But it was seen as a moral duty to take on board not only six former Communist states but three - Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia - which were actually part of the old Soviet Union.

But the EU is willing to undergo another bout of indigestion for the sake of the Balkans, haunted as it is by its failure to cope with the collapse of Yugoslavia and the horrific violence that it unleashed. Slovenia is already inside the EU's loving arms. Montenegro, Macedonia, Croatia and Kosovo are mustard keen to join. The European Union doesn't want Serbia to be the black hole in the Balkans.

But about half the population apparently want to turn instead to the East. It's not that odd, I reflected earlier in the week as I listened to music that will never make it to Eurovision. In one of the main churches of central Belgrade, three orthodox priests in shimmering gold and red robes sang the beautiful Mass. Serbs who look to Russia do not just do so out of a fit of pique against nations which recognised Kosovo - religion, alphabet and culture are linked. And as a young pro-European businessman pointed out, there's another reason people have for liking the Russians, as he said succinctly, "They didn't bomb this city. The EU and Nato did that."

It was a few months ago. while retreating behind UN lines of in front of angry Serbs marching through the ethnically-divided city of Mitrovitza to protest about the declaration of independence by Kosovo, that a Danish journalist reminded me that this link with Russia is cemented by admiration. She pointed out that after the death of Anna Karenina, her lover goes to join the Serbian cavalry. Russians see Serbs as dashingly romantic defending the frontier of THEIR civilisation.

So a Russian future would not be historically unlikely. But it won't happen. Strange as it may seem to those in Britain who see the EU as rather old-fashioned and not much to write home about, in Eastern Europe joining is seen both as a badge of modernity and a promise of prosperity.

But Kosovo remains a very real stumbling block. The pro-Europeans can only form a government with the support of the anti-European socialists, who happen to be the party that once had the dictator Slobodan Milosovic as its leader. on trial for war crimes but the party still honour his memory and the current leaders say their main purpose in joining a government will be to stiffen the position that Kosovo is part of Serbia.

Few Serbian politicians will tell the awkward truth that whether it is sad, wrong, or against international law, Kosovo is not going to revert to Serbian ownership any time soon.

Unfortunately, back at Eurovision, the Serbs are not practising their entry so I don't actually get to hear it in the flesh, but the lyrics which could be a lament for a dead lover have some distinctly odd touches: "My wheat put me to sleep, wake me up on St Vitus' day". Terry Wogan may not spot it but a Serbian audience would recognise a heavily-coded reference to the battle of Kosovo in the Middle Ages, an event which looms very large in the Serb nationalists' consciousness. Maybe their entry should be accompanied by dancers stumbling around as if climbing a boulder-strewn path towards a European destiny?

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