Spatial plan, Bitola, Dojran and Ohrid, plague in Irkutsk: the announcements arrived, the answers are waiting for a report

The draft that put our emptying on paper

Macedonia is being planned according to a document that expired in 2020. That wasn't the opposition talking - it was the ministry itself, at the public hearing in Bitola. The new plan to 2040 is still a draft, five years after the contract to write it was signed.

And in that draft, the state wrote into its own document what every village already knows by heart: the population will keep shrinking, settlements with 100 residents or fewer make up almost half of all settlements, and nearly a third of all flats stand empty. The flats are there. The people to live in them - fewer and fewer.

On page 187 of the draft, Kazandol is back - the mine whose concession the state terminated in 2018 and whose closure it defended before an international tribunal in July 2025. The plan promises a train from Bitola to Skopje in 90 minutes and a third national park. Who will still be in Pelagonia to ride those rails?

Bitola: the festival arrived before the road

This week Bitola got "Chkembe Fest" - a festival of tripe soup, the dish that gave Bitola's people their nickname - with ten teams competing and a proposal for a monument to the "Chkembar" in the old bazaar. In the municipal programmes, on paper, some 30 million denars are set aside for festivals and events.

The Prilep - Bitola motorway will have 12 of its 40 kilometres in use next year. For the 25 kilometres between Farish and Prilep, the state still hasn't even decided whether they will be a motorway or an expressway - and those are exactly the kilometres meant to join the two projects into one road to Pelagonia.

Bitola's Local Environmental Action Plan was adopted in 2024, and the body meant to monitor it met for the first time on 7 October. How much has actually been done, the press release doesn't say. Meanwhile, the head of the Higher Public Prosecutor's Office in Bitola was left without his passport, suspected of lobbying for lighter sentences in at least four cases across a region of five towns. Who is going to re-check the verdicts handed down under that kind of "lobbying"?

The lakes are measured to the centimetre, the shore isn't

Lake Dojran stands at 144.93 metres above sea level, 1.20 metres below the minimum level agreed with Greece. Water is flowing through the canal of the lake's rescue system. How much - not even the Hydrometeorological Service, the agency that measures the water level, knows. Lake Ohrid is five centimetres above its October average, after a ten-centimetre drop in two days in August for which the published measurements offer no explanation.

Meanwhile, on the Ohrid shore near Biljanini Izvori, a stone wall is going up. Citizens filmed it, the "Ohrid SOS" initiative dubbed it "the Great Wall of Ohrid", and Mayor Kiril Pecakov is waiting for the inspection report before saying who is building it and whether there are any documents. The state knows that Lake Ohrid is 26 centimetres above its minimum. Who is digging on a UNESCO-protected shore - that, for now, nobody is saying.

"Stable" - the word of the week

In Irkutsk, a 28-year-old employee of the anti-plague institute died. The official diagnosis: "pneumonia of unknown etiology" - at an institute whose entire job is plague. Rospotrebnadzor declared the situation "stable". Meanwhile the hospital is under quarantine, around 200 people are under surveillance, and ambulances are driving with FSB escorts.

In Bulgaria's economic zone in the Black Sea, drones sank a cargo ship, and of its crew there is no trace. Zelensky blames Russia. Sofia says it cannot confirm whose drones they were. And NATO, ahead of its annual nuclear exercise from 13 to 23 October, told Moscow there is no reason for concern. When everyone is working this hard to calm things down, who exactly is supposed to stay calm?

Citizens ahead of the institutions

For six months, the residents of Pchinja and Studena Bara breathed smoke from the "Krasta" landfill. The machinery promised by 2 October never came, so they blockaded the landfill themselves. Only then did the Kumanovo council redirect four million denars to repair the machinery.

On Ilindenska Boulevard in Skopje's Karpos district, a mare gave birth in the middle of the road. Passers-by filmed it, nobody picked up the phone at "Lajka", the city's stray-animal service, and one woman pulled the foal off the asphalt. In both stories the institutions did react - after somebody else had already done the first job.

Skopje's new garbage trucks were photographed more than a month ago, and they are still not on the streets - they are waiting for "legal procedures". That sentence sums up the whole week: the announcement is ready, the last line is missing. The coming days will show whether the inspection report on the Ohrid wall arrives, whether the trucks hit the road, and what the budget revision does about the 7-8 billion denar hole.