When you read a headline that "a war has begun between Ukraine and Poland", you stop first and wonder. There is no war. There is something far more Balkan: a quarrel over history, over medals, and over who owes whom what - wrapped in a sarcastic remark about tanks and planes.

The whole story started with symbols. Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of Poland's highest decoration, the Order of the White Eagle. The trigger: Zelensky took part in a ceremony honouring the leaders of the UPA - the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which Poland holds responsible for the Volyn massacre and the deaths of tens of thousands of Poles during the Second World War.

That's where former Polish PM Leszek Miller stepped in with a retort that set the headlines alight. "Since everyone is so keen to give back what they got, let them give back the MiGs, the tanks and the weapons too," he said - sarcastically, not as a demand. His point was clear: it's easy to hand back medals, harder to acknowledge how much material aid Ukraine received from its neighbours.

For a Balkan reader, this scene is painfully familiar. Two countries that are allies on paper, yet can't agree whose truth about the shared past is the right one. How many times have we watched the same thing at home - rows over names, over heroes, over who liberated whom and who occupied whom? The history of these lands is rarely a closed book; more often it's an open wound that each generation picks at anew.

That's why it pays to read carefully. There are no tanks on the border, no shot fired between Warsaw and Kyiv. There is only something the Balkans understand well: that the hardest battles between neighbours are fought not with weapons, but with memories - and that there is no quick victory there for anyone.