Vladimir Putin stood before an audience on Navy Day in St Petersburg and, instead of talking about ships, opened the map. The western parts of Ukraine, he said, will sooner or later be taken from it - and returned to where they historically belonged: to Poland, Hungary and Romania.

His argument is familiar and he has been repeating it for years: those territories, Putin says, were a gift from Stalin to Ukraine within the single Soviet state after the Second World War. From which follows the conclusion that a gift is not permanent property. He left the timeline wide open - it could take a few years, it could take a few decades - but he presented the outcome itself as historically inevitable.

Who draws the line, and on what basis

This is not a military threat against Warsaw, Budapest or Bucharest. It is something different and, viewed over the longer term, more worrying: the claim that existing borders are temporary because someone in the past drew them wrong.

That principle has nowhere to stop. If it holds for western Ukraine because Stalin signed something, then it holds for every other line on the European map drawn after 1945. And the Balkans have such lines in abundance, each of them with at least two parties who believe it was taken from them.

Yugoslavia as an argument - but whose?

The most interesting part of the speech is that Putin brought up Yugoslavia himself. He used it as proof of Western responsibility - the West, he claims, carved up that state too, exactly as it is now doing with Ukraine.

The books do not balance there. If the breakup of Yugoslavia was an injustice, then invoking historical borders from before Stalin is the same operation with a different signature. Carving up cannot be a crime when others do it and historical justice when you announce it yourself.

Putin also accused NATO of enlargement despite what he calls promises given to Gorbachev, and described the 2014 events in Kyiv as a „bloody and unlawful coup” that the West ignored. His conclusion was that the war grew out of „absolutely aggressive activities” by the West that intensified year after year.

Why someone in Skopje should read this

Because rhetoric about „historic places” to which peoples and territories return is not a Russian invention and does not stay in Russia. It is a vocabulary understood on this peninsula without translation, and one that has always found someone here willing to borrow it.

Poland, Hungary and Romania have officially shown no interest in the gift Moscow is offering. And that is the key detail: the offer is not addressed to them, it is addressed to everyone listening. The maps are back on the table - and nobody said where the edge of the table is.