At the NATO summit in Ankara, Croatian President Zoran Milanović didn't keep quiet about a topic many in the region would rather avoid: the arming of Serbia. Milanović openly stated that Serbia possesses long-range Israeli missiles - with a range, in his words, of several hundred kilometres - and that it was his duty to raise it before the alliance. "NATO must know something about this," he said.

The Croatian president went a step further, announcing that Croatia would have to respond "symmetrically" - that is, equip itself with something similar, as he puts it, for defensive reasons. With that, the old Balkan logic returned to the table: the moment a neighbour buys weapons, you must too, because otherwise you stay "more vulnerable." We know the spiral by heart - everyone arms up "just for defence," and in the end the whole region sits on a bigger pile of weapons than ten years ago.

Serbia has for years openly modernised its army, acquiring hardware from Russia, China, and now, according to these claims, from Israel as well. Whether it really is missiles of such range, or a politically alarmist performance for the cameras at the summit, is hard to confirm without independent data. Milanović is a politician whose sharp rhetoric toward Belgrade has never hurt him at home.

But let's set aside who believes whom and how much. The point for the ordinary citizen in the Balkans is different and simpler: while leaders compete over who has longer missiles, not a single one of those millions of euros goes into hospitals, schools or wages. A region that has been emptying for decades of people fleeing abroad suddenly finds a budget for weapons. Every arms race in the Balkans has the same price - it's paid by those who stay.