In a podcast appearance, Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić asked the question nobody in Western offices wants to hear: why does one set of rules apply to Ukraine and an entirely different one to Serbia.

„Why did you take 14 percent of the territory of Serbia, which was under the guarantees of the UN Charter and a UN resolution? That happened after the aggression against Serbia by 19 NATO countries, without the approval of the UN Security Council”, Vučić said.

The wording is sharp, but the argument is not new - it is the same one Belgrade has repeated since 1999. What is new is the context: that argument is now made in a world where territorial integrity has suddenly become the highest value of Western diplomacy, after Russia violated Ukraine's integrity.

Vučić called it opening Pandora's box. At the same time he said Serbia supports Ukraine's territorial integrity, but added that he has the right to say peace must also be reached through compromise. A position trying to sit on two chairs - and at the moment clearly managing it.

The Brussels agreement that stayed on paper

Here Vučić played his strongest card: the 2013 Brussels agreement, personally guaranteed by the EU, whose key provision - the formation of the Association of Serb Municipalities - was never implemented. When one side fails to deliver on an agreement for years and the guarantor stays silent, what is the guarantee worth?

On EU integration Vučić stayed reserved. Membership remains a strategic goal, he said, with the caveat that he sees things inside the EU itself he does not like. That is a vocabulary the Balkans knows by heart - formally yes, in substance we wait.

Would we have acted the same? Macedonia went through its own version of the same story - a constitutional change, a name change, concessions made up front for something still to come. The difference is that Belgrade is demanding its concessions back with a microphone in hand, while Skopje handed them over without getting what they were given for.