The night over Kyiv last week wasn't a night. It was one of the heaviest combined Russian attacks of this war - hundreds of kamikaze drones, ballistic and cruise missiles in several waves, with explosions and fires lighting up an entire city.

The result in the first moment: one dead, sixteen wounded. Rescuers in a working operation in the Darnytsia district, where part of a residential block collapsed. That number will rise. Ukraine's military intelligence said Russia had applied a new tactic - drones are launched in dense formations from the Belarusian border to overload the air-defence shield.

„The city is under a heavy enemy attack," said Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv. „The enemy is trying to overload our air defences in order to push more targets deeper to the west," added Sergiy Beskrestnov, adviser at the Ukrainian Defence Ministry.

The timing is no coincidence. At exactly the same moment, President Donald Trump is in China, in talks with Xi Jinping. Zelensky linked the action directly: „Russia is obviously trying to disrupt the broader political atmosphere." That sounds diplomatic, but the translation is simple - Moscow doesn't want a peaceful Trump-Xi summit. It wants a noisy backdrop.

The Balkans watch this from afar, but not that far. Thousands of Ukrainian refugees passed through Skopje, Sofia and Zagreb over the past three years. Macedonian media reproduce the same videos - explosions in Kyiv, ruined blocks in Darnytsia - but the question that doesn't get asked out loud is: how many wars in the neighbourhood can Europe stand before it finally reacts with something more than condemnations?

Until then, the night returned over Kyiv. And in all likelihood, it won't be the last.