On election day, in a Serb community in Kosovo, two men were detained. The reason, according to Kosovo police: an attempt to influence voters to support a particular Serb list. The reason, according to Belgrade: fear packaged as an operation, timed precisely for the day when every vote counts.

The case played out in Gorazhdevac near Peja, where Milos Dimitrijevic and Ranko Zdravkovic were detained. Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic reacted sharply, calling the arrests "unjust" and part of broader pressure on the remaining Serb population in Kosovo and Metohija.

"Continuous terror, intimidation and open political persecution" - with those words Dacic described the situation, claiming that such "made-up operations" are deliberately carried out precisely on election day to instill fear and panic. He called on the international community, KFOR and EULEX to react in line with Resolution 1244 and to stop their "passive observation."

This is a good moment to keep a clear head. Dacic speaks as an interested party, and his version is political just as much as Pristina's - when accusations fly on election day, the truth usually sits somewhere in the middle, waiting for someone to look for it. But regardless of who is right, the point for the region is the same: twenty-five years after the war, Kosovo is still a place where one arrest can escalate into an international incident within hours.

For the Macedonian reader, this is no distant news. The Balkans are small, the borders are porous, and tension in one place rarely stays only there. The question left hanging in the air is the old Balkan one: when will we learn that stability isn't built by election-day arrests - from any side?