When Moscow wants to explain why it does not want a ceasefire, it does not reach for Afghanistan, nor for Korea. It reaches for us.

Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of Russia's Federation Council, explained the Russian position on negotiations with Ukraine through a single sentence: "Do you remember the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia?" And then the condition - Russia will accept peace talks only if what is on the table is a secure peace plan, one under which nothing similar ever comes out of Ukraine again, so that it never becomes an "anti-Russia" and never serves as a tool with which the West tries to inflict a geopolitical defeat on Moscow.

The Balkans as an argument, not as a subject

Notice what happened there. Yugoslavia was not mentioned as history, nor as a victim, nor as something owed an explanation. It was mentioned as a warning - as evidence in a Russian argument that a temporary ceasefire is a trap. Our entire nineties, with everything they carried, compressed into one subordinate clause in a speech about Ukraine.

Matviyenko maintains that Moscow will not accept a ceasefire that would serve only as a pause for rebuilding the Ukrainian army, that any agreement must be lasting and come with guarantees, and that Russia will continue with the goals it set at the outset. She also accused Ukrainian media of not showing their own public the real situation at the front.

Both sides use the same region

This is not a Russian speciality. For decades the Balkans has been used as a rhetorical reserve in other people's arguments - for intervention and against intervention, for borders and against borders, for negotiations and against negotiations. Anyone wanting to prove something large and abstract finds a ready-made example here and takes it without asking.

What rarely happens is for one of those using the image to ask what it looked like from the other side. Thirty years on, Yugoslavia is still more comfortable as an argument than as a real place with people still living with the consequences.

Which is why the least interesting part of this statement is the part about Ukraine. The interesting part is how easily someone's past turns into someone else's bargaining chip - and how little of that depends on us.

Did anyone ever ask whether we want to be somebody's lesson?