The smoke arrived before the fire. A thick curtain has covered almost the entire municipality of Lipkovo, parts of Aracinovo, and it can be felt in Kumanovo too. The fire itself is, for now, on the other side of the border - but it is moving towards it.

The information came from Kire Mihailov, deputy director of the state forestry company "National Forests", posting on his social media. According to him, the fire is spreading from the direction of the Serbian village of Trnava towards the village of Straza in the Lipkovo municipality, right above the Tabanovce border crossing.

"This is a very bad fire with enormous intensity," Mihailov wrote, appealing for it to be brought under control before it reaches Macedonian territory.

An appeal - and then what?

The appeal has been made, but it is not clear to whom. The fire is burning in Serbia, under Serbian jurisdiction. The Macedonian side can watch the smoke, count the hectares that are still to burn, and wait. Cross-border coordination on firefighting is exactly the kind of mechanism that exists on paper in regional agreements and is rarely tested until it is needed - by which point it is already late.

Macedonia, meanwhile, is in no position to watch someone else's fire with a clear conscience. In the past 24 hours, 31 open-air fires were registered here, eight of them still active. The recent fires in the Lipkovo area make the northern border the most strained point on the map.

So far there is no confirmation that the flames have crossed the border. But the thick smoke over the north-east of the country is not merely unpleasant to breathe - it is a warning that the fire risk remains high, and that the next one to burn may not be someone else's.