Skopje cannot breathe again tonight. The wind is carrying smoke from a large forest fire on the border with Kosovo, near the village of Gračani, with a fire line several kilometres long stretching across both Macedonian and Kosovar territory. Residents report breathing problems and eye irritation, and sleeping with the window open has not been an option for several nights.

The Protection and Rescue Directorate calls the situation alarming. The Crisis Management Centre logged 23 open-air fires by 18:00 alone, eight of them still active. The worst areas are Gjorče Petrov, Makedonski Brod, Struga, and Mavrovo and Rostuša. Interior Ministry helicopters, air tractors, off-road vehicles and volunteer fire crews from several towns are all in the field.

Fire does not fall from the sky

Stojanče Angelov, who heads the Directorate, said what is rarely said from an official position: a large share of these fires is set deliberately. And he named the motive - profit, and covering the tracks of illegal logging. The flames, he says, often appear precisely where the forest was cut earlier, where dry branches and vegetation left on the clearings help the fire spread.

Near the village of Nogaevci in the Veles area, in the municipality of Gradsko, a pine forest burned and threw up a mushroom-shaped column of smoke visible from the motorway. Locals told Angelov the same stretch had been set alight several times in recent days. Not once - several times. That is no longer an accident, that is a schedule.

What "an appropriate charge will follow" means

Police are looking for those responsible. In the Struga region, on the local road between Zagračani and Dolna Belica, an 85-year-old man was arrested for setting a fire near the spot known as "Lok". One arrest, around twenty active hotspots. That ratio tells you everything about how hard it is to prove forest arson in a country where every second fire is explained away by high temperatures.

And the temperatures are real - next week brings another 36 degrees and wind. But heat does not set a forest alight. Heat only makes the job easier for the people who do.

The crews in the field

Near Ramno on Skopska Crna Gora there is a fire strongly suspected of being deliberately set. Near the Struga villages of Oktisi and Podgorci, mixed and pine forest is burning. At Selci and Lokov, a Directorate fire team made up of volunteer firefighters from Bitola went in - people who are not paid for this, working through a thick layer of dry branches and leaves on terrain that is hard to reach.

There are active hotspots near Belica in Makedonski Brod, near the Kičevo villages of Tajmište and Dobrenoec, and burning landfills in Štip. Angelov says the crews are exhausted. That is not a figure of speech - it is an admission that the system is running on fumes.

Who is going to answer for this?

If the motive really is covering up illegal logging, then these fires are not a problem for the fire service. They are the consequence of something that should have been stopped far earlier - by the forest police, by the inspectorates, by whoever issues the logging permits. Firefighters put out the consequence. The clearing is the cause, and it sits there for months before anything is set alight.

Every year the same story is retold as if it were a weather event. Every year the exhausted crews are photographed as heroes, which they are. And every year the question of who cut that forest before it burned goes unanswered, because the answer requires an investigation, not a helicopter.