Kyiv may face a catastrophic winter. The capital's heating may not be functional. And mayor Vitali Klitschko is openly blaming his own government, not Russia.

On his Telegram channel, Klitschko wrote that the central authorities - meaning Zelensky's government - are to blame for letting the situation slip. The Ministry for Community Development promised state funds for the rehabilitation of Heating Plant 5. The promise stayed a promise. Now, with time having passed, the ministry says the matter is „exclusively up to Kyiv". Translation: a year of 24/7 propaganda about unity, but when the bill comes - we push it down to the city level.

The picture is even worse on the right bank. 80 per cent of Heating Plant 6 in Troieshchyna was destroyed in a fire. Lawmaker Oleksiy Kucherenko warned that heating in the Darnytskyi district will likely not be restored by next winter. That's a significant part of the city - hundreds of thousands of people.

For the Balkans, this is a new optic on the Ukrainian war. Gone are the days when every story was „Ukraine is the victim, the West helps". Now political clashes between the mayor and the president are spilling into the open. Internal rifts always come when wars drag on - not in the first year, but in the third and fourth. And for the Balkans, which already lived through two decades of political rifts during transition, this is a familiar scenario.

Klitschko is not the first mayor to clash with a central government in a European country. But Kyiv is not a „European city" in the routine sense right now - it's a city at war. That makes the accusation more clear-cut: if the authorities cannot help the capital survive a winter, what does that say about the rest of the country?

The question that remains: will next winter just be another line item in „the cost of war" - or a sign that Ukraine's central administration is starting to crack at its own seams?