Serbia has been burning for over a month, and President Aleksandar Vucic went out to the Deliblato Sands to tell the nation that it is - a superpower. "We are a European superpower in firefighting," he said, adding that Serbian helicopters are better than European ones because they carry a heavier load. The fire there has been burning since 21 July.

The figures Vucic himself cited sound like a success right up until you read them carefully: no fatalities, no buildings burned. One portable toilet was destroyed. Three firefighters found themselves in the path of a fire whirl. That is the damage list the government is offering as proof of top-tier efficiency - while the same fire has covered around 3,960 hectares, 3,111 of them forest.

When help wasn't needed, and then suddenly was

The most interesting part of the story is not the fire, but the chronology of the statements. On 7 August, Minister Dacic claimed that Spain and France were asking Serbia for help, not the other way round. On 16 August, Vucic said help had been offered but was not needed. And now Black Hawk helicopters from Czechia, Slovakia and Romania are working the ground, plus a Russian Ilyushin - and the Russian one was requested first, because of its greater capacity.

So: a superpower receiving help from three neighbouring countries and one distant one. Is that a superpower, or is it the ordinary, normal system of mutual assistance that operates across Europe every summer? The only difference is that the others do not hold a press conference to announce it.

Nine years of equipment

"In the last nine years we have procured more equipment than in the previous thirty," Vucic said. The sentence is engineered to sound like investment, but it also says something else: for thirty years, almost nothing was bought. When a country starts buying firefighting equipment only after its forests have burned for weeks, that is not a strategy - it is a reaction.

The Balkans know this scene by heart. Summer, fire, a minister in a hi-vis vest, cameras, and a hectare count nobody will check later. The question left over is not how many helicopters Serbia has, but why one forest area burns for more than a month in a country that declares itself a superpower at putting fires out.