The Vodno cable car: two inspections, two opposite findings

Last August a state inspection of the Skopje cable car concluded there were no technical irregularities. This week we learned that three of its four safety sensors were dead, the cables were damaged, and the rubber components were worn to the point where the gondolas were rattling. That finding comes from the Austrian manufacturer, the same firm that built the thing, and its engineers demanded the whole system be shut down immediately. The mayor put it in a sentence worth reading twice: it was on the edge of a tragedy.

Nothing happened between those two findings that would explain the gap. Cables do not fray overnight and sensors do not all fail at once. So either the two inspections were not measuring the same thing, or one of them was not measuring at all. There is no third option. The city is now looking for a company to assess the damage, while saying that accountability is a matter for the investigators. Accountability does get established that way. But the question of what exactly was checked last August does not need an investigation. It needs one document.

Same mountain, same week: the plan against its own plan

The municipality of Centar has its own Local Energy and Climate Plan, and that plan states that urbanising the slopes of Vodno can trigger erosion, flash floods and landslides. The same municipality is now pushing through a draft detailed urban plan for Barutana without completed hydrological, hydrogeological or geotechnical analyses. Both documents are its own. Only one of them gets voted on.

The numbers explain the alarm better than any statement could. The General Plan allows 6,500 square metres of built area on that site. The draft allows 29,000. Of 9,500 square metres of designated greenery, 268 survive. The terrain drops 80 metres. That a stamp on a document like this is not a formality was demonstrated again in Karpos, where officials issued an extract from a plan the Constitutional Court struck down back in 2018, after the same request had already been rejected twice.

The audit: properly paid for, never used

The State Audit Office finished its review of procurement at the national power company, and the findings are specific. A gas engine bought for 2.48 million euros that was never put into operation, an additive worth 2.29 million that sat until its shelf life expired, relocated equipment worth 1.72 million that was never used. Nearly 6.5 million euros for three line items that produced not one kilowatt-hour. The procurement plan was amended 19 times in a single year. Amend a plan that often and it stops being a plan.

The same mechanism shows up elsewhere. The state paid out 64.4 million euros in employment-dispute judgments, and 95 percent of that was not paid voluntarily but collected by bailiffs. Almost half the total is interest and costs incurred purely by paying late. One prison spent roughly a fifth of its entire budget on this. Set against those figures, the two public calls covering the whole of Macedonian industry come to seven million denars, about 114,000 euros, enough for twenty-odd companies.

Agriculture produced two versions of the same harvest in the same week. The minister says the grape buy-up is running smoothly and has figures to back it, while in Tremnik the growers say vranec is not being bought at all. In Prespa, industrial apples dropped to 4 denars a kilo against a production cost of around ten. A weaker crop, a halved price. That fits no economic logic whatsoever, but it fits perfectly with who is quoting the number.

The speed depends on who is asking

When someone threatened the prime minister on Instagram, a criminal complaint, an indictment and eight days of detention followed within days, without the prime minister filing anything himself. The police acted on their own knowledge of the offence, which is their legal right and duty. That mechanism was not invented for the occasion and applies to every citizen. The question is not why it engaged. It is why it engages only sometimes.

Because in the same week a nurse with ten years in the health service described begging for a doctor from Ohrid through Struga to Skopje while bleeding, and losing her pregnancy in the 24th week - and the review commission started work only after she went public. The family of Ljupco, missing a month, is asking why his name is not even on the interior ministry's own list, a publication that requires no budget, no tender and no committee session. At the Kocani trial, an inspector testified that in 2023 she asked the owner of the Puls club for his licence, never got it, wrote that down in a report, and the report travelled up the hierarchy. And then nothing. The system was working. It just was not acting.

This is not an impression, it is measurable. Monitoring found that two of every three verdicts in 2025 were never published, against 40 percent the year before, with hearings scheduled twice a year. Inside the interior ministry itself, an employee spent six years altering licence categories for people who never sat the exam, after a court had already once ordered her reinstated. The system caught her. Then it put her back.

The Hague: everyone read into the verdict what they already believed

Before the ruling, a digital clock stood in the square in Pristina counting down, under a banner demanding they be declared innocent. On Wednesday Hashim Thaci was given 25 years for war crimes. The court established at least 385 people unlawfully detained, 303 tortured and 98 killed, with 81 years of prison across the four defendants, while the crimes-against-humanity counts were not proven.

Then everyone read the same document differently. Belgrade called it a belated confirmation and, in the same breath, called the dropped counts a political manoeuvre. Albania's parliament fast-tracked a declaration calling the verdict deeply unjust. Washington said the court should never have tried them at all. And Brussels, the institution that created that court, said nothing. In the same week Marta Kos listed the countries getting a roadmap to the EU - Montenegro, Albania, Moldova, Ukraine - while for Macedonia there was the condition we all know by heart, with the second half of the sentence aimed not at Skopje but at Sofia. An expectation, not a guarantee.

The border: the strikes arrived, the owner did not

A Russian drone set a petrol station alight at the crossing into Poland, days after the Polish prime minister publicly warned that exactly these strikes were coming. The warning was accurate. The protection was not there. A day earlier a drone hit a train two kilometres from NATO territory, on a line European diplomats had travelled hours before. Over Lithuania a drone was shot down minutes after midnight, and all of Vilnius got a warning on their phones. Whose it was, nobody is yet claiming to know.

The same pattern repeats further down the map. A second ammunition depot belonging to the same company burned in Bulgaria within a month: the company says sabotage, the minister says the inspections are a formality - and the site had passed seven state checks this year. When none of these events has a confirmed owner, that does not mean nobody caused them.

A measure with an expiry date, and one number that tells the whole week

The government cut VAT on fuel from 18 to 10 percent, and diesel got about two denars cheaper while petrol went up by three and a half. The tax falls, petrol rises, and both are true at once. Eurosuper BS-95 broke through 100 denars, diesel fell to 99, but the measure runs only to 28 September, written into the decision itself.

The cleanest illustration came from Belgrade. The ruling list gathered 170,000 signatures in three hours, which by one lawyer's arithmetic would need 230 notaries certifying four signatures a minute, while the students with 250 candidates queued all weekend because there were not enough notaries. Nobody banned anything. The counter simply worked more slowly for one side.

Every one of these stories has a tidy document behind it: an inspection from August, a climate plan, a procurement plan, an inspector's report, a legal provision on acting upon knowledge of an offence. None of it was missing. What was missing was someone to read it while it still meant something.