Tonight Skopje is breathing smoke again. Residents of Centar, Aerodrom and Karpoš are posting that the smell of burning has got into their flats, and this time the source is neither a landfill nor somebody's back yard. The fire is coming from the other side of the border.

The forest fire that broke out on Kosovo territory during the night pushed into the border strip near the Skopje village of Gračani, in the municipality of Đorče Petrov. According to field data, the fire line was more than five kilometres long. Dry grass, low vegetation and forest were burning on mountain terrain that is almost impossible to reach.

Skopje firefighters, teams from the Protection and Rescue Directorate and two air tractors working from above were deployed on the ground. The Directorate's head, Stojanče Angelov, said the fire line had been cut at the critical points and that the immediate threat to the village had been removed.

And here is the detail that makes this different from every other summer fire. At Kosovo's request, Macedonia today deployed a state aircraft to fight a fire outside its own territory for the first time. An Interior Ministry helicopter intervened in the area of Han i Elezit. The information was confirmed by Muhamed Ali, head of the Crisis Management Centre.

So on the same day the smoke from Gračani is choking Skopje, our helicopter is flying over Kosovo. That is not a contradiction - fire does not recognise a border crossing, and every metre put out on the other side is a metre that will not reach us. But it is a neat illustration of how pointless it is to treat a wildfire as a national question when the vegetation is identical on both sides of the line on the map.

The figures from the past twenty-four hours show the real scale: 27 open-air fires across the country, two of them active, three under control and 22 extinguished. The active ones were near Mavrovo and Rostuše, at a spot called Golem Brdaš, and in Šuto Orizari near Vizbegovo, where a landfill behind a hotel is burning.

A landfill burning inside a Skopje municipality is not a forest fire. It is waste somebody left to pile up until it set itself alight. And while we help put out fires across the border, the question still open at home is why landfills reach the point of spontaneous combustion at all.