Vučić at a summit in Ukraine while von der Leyen cancels her Belgrade visit: trade with Ukraine up 42 per cent

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić spoke from Ukraine, where he took part in a meeting of the Carpathian Initiative. The image is worth a second look: a man Brussels regularly criticises for not imposing sanctions on Russia is sitting at a summit in Ukraine, talking to the Polish prime minister and the Romanian president.

The numbers he is offering

Vučić announced that trade with Ukraine had grown by 42 per cent, mostly in consumer goods. He also stressed that the summit brought together representatives of states with a combined population of about 120 million, with Ukraine, Romania and Poland alone accounting for some 90 million. Serbia's development agency was present too, tasked with presenting to investors what the country has to offer.

Of the eight countries in the initiative, he said, only Hungary was absent. That is a detail worth remembering better than any statement made at the summit.

Serbia's president also rated his bilateral meeting with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk as good, and said Romanian President Nicușor Dan had moved things along considerably on building the motorway to Timisoara. They also discussed energy connections and tourism. A bilateral meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was, he said, still to come.

What was not on the agenda

The most interesting thing about this appearance is not what happened at the summit, but what did not happen in Belgrade. Asked about Ursula von der Leyen cancelling her visit to Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vučić judged that they had found an "elegant way" of saying it was because of the elections - in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia - and that she knows perfectly well what public opinion in Serbia looks like.

Translation: the top of the European Commission did not want a photograph with the host a few weeks before a vote. That is political calculation, not protocol.

This is where the story becomes Balkan rather than merely Serbian. A regional connectivity initiative - roads, energy, tourism - looks like something almost nobody could object to, while a visit by a senior European official is measured against an electoral calendar. Infrastructure is built over decades; political goodwill lasts until the next vote. How many times in the last thirty years has the region seen precisely that difference?

The road to Timisoara or an energy interconnector do not stop being useful depending on who won an election. The question is whether in Belgrade, in Skopje and in Sarajevo those projects get the same careful attention as the summit photographs - or whether they too serve mainly as a backdrop.