Ukraine these days looks to the sky with a fear it hasn't felt before. The military leadership in Kyiv warns that between June 11 and 14 there's a high probability Russia will for the first time use the "Oreshnik" missile with a real, destructive payload - and not, as before, merely for demonstration.

The difference isn't cosmetic. The launches so far were a message - a show of force without maximum damage. Now Kyiv fears that instead, warheads with explosives or fragmentation are coming, which could do incomparably greater damage. When a message becomes an attack, the rhetoric ends where the casualties begin.

Technically, the "Oreshnik" is a medium-range missile developed from the technology of the RS-26 "Rubezh." It flies at over Mach 10 - more than 12,000 kilometers per hour - and can carry six warhead blocks, or up to 36 elements that strike simultaneously. From launch to target takes only a few minutes.

The problem for Ukraine is that it has nothing to intercept it. Neither the "Patriot" systems, nor the more advanced American "THAAD" or the Israeli "Arrow 3" - which Kyiv doesn't have - offer reliable protection against targets arriving simultaneously, at extreme speed, along hard-to-predict trajectories. In other words, this is a weapon against which defense, at the moment, is almost theoretical.

For the Balkans this is no distant news. Every escalation in this war spills over into energy prices, into waves of refugees, and into the market jitters we feel directly. And every new "wonder missile" is a reminder of how quickly the rhetoric of deterrence can turn into real damage. The question isn't only whether Putin will launch - but how many times the world will let the threshold of the "unthinkable" be quietly nudged.