Just a few hours before the announced ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine was supposed to come into force, Russian strikes across eastern Ukraine took at least 27 lives. Zaporizhzhia - 12 dead, around 20 wounded. Kramatorsk - 6 dead, 12 wounded. Dnipro - 4. The Poltava region - 5, including rescue workers who had come to deal with the damage from the first strikes.

Zelensky called the attacks „cynical and senseless". He was right. But cynicism, as the Balkans know well, isn't a mistake in war - it's a strategy.

Ukraine proposed an open ceasefire to start at midnight on May 6, and asked Moscow to stop the strikes. Russia answered with its own „ceasefire" - but only for May 8 and 9, when Victory Day is traditionally celebrated. In other words: we'll pause exactly when it suits us.

This is the „peace" we always see in the Balkans - temporary, symbolic, ceremonial. When Moscow cancelled Vienna in 1989 not because of the war in Croatia but because of the May 9 celebration, that rings familiar to anyone who remembers the breakup of Yugoslavia. The holiday is more important than life.

And why exactly bomb gas facilities in Poltava on the eve of the announced ceasefire? Because you want to blow up the capacity of the energy system right before the cold half of the year. Then you can negotiate from a position of strength: you offer a ceasefire when the opponent can't heat their home.

Zelensky asks for peace on a timeline; Putin replies with a date for a parade. And while the West is busy with Iran, Hormuz and Trump, the same three-year war is grinding on in Ukraine - with one difference. The world is now looking even less often.

Do we, in the Balkans, remember well enough that every „pause" in our neighbours' war in the 1990s was an advertisement for the next escalation? That's the lesson Zaporizhzhia is teaching today - sadly, with another 27 families burying their own.