Aleksandar Vučić and Vladimir Putin spoke by phone, and the Kremlin then released details. Vučić congratulated Putin on the State Duma elections, held from September 18 to 20. According to the statement, the two presidents stressed that foreign interference in electoral processes is unacceptable. A sentence that sounds serious - until you read the rest of the conversation.

The Serbian president especially thanked Putin for Russia's help during the huge wildfires that hit Serbia this summer. On Putin's orders, in August Russia sent an Il-76 aircraft from the Emergencies Ministry, with a crew and an operational team, stationed at Niš's Constantine the Great airport. The plane took part in firefighting for almost a month: according to Russian services, it flew 65 sorties and dropped a total of 2,730 tons of water in 130 drops. Vučić publicly thanked Moscow back then, saying the Russian plane directly helped save dozens of buildings.

One of the main topics was once again energy. Belgrade and Moscow are right now trying to seal a new deal on supplying Serbia with Russian gas. Just two days earlier, in New York, Vučić spoke with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and said he hoped the new gas deal would be done by the end of September. Russia remains one of Serbia's key natural gas suppliers, and the two countries' energy relations also run through the question of the oil sector. After the call Vučić said: "We will have a low gas price, we talked about NIS and all the important topics."

They also talked about Ukraine. That's where Vučić best shows off his political gymnastics: a few days before the call he met Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine, then sat down with Lavrov in New York, and finally spoke with Putin - just as he announced before returning from the US.

And that brings us to Bosnia. According to the Kremlin, Putin and Vučić stressed the need to preserve the Dayton architecture of Bosnia and Herzegovina and to protect the rights that stem from it. Russia has long held that the Dayton Agreement must remain the basis of BiH's internal order and insists on preserving the constitutional position of Republika Srpska as one of the two entities. The same was announced after their previous call in March.

Two presidents in the same conversation oppose foreign meddling in elections - and then discuss the internal order of a third, sovereign country. Did anyone ask Sarajevo what it thinks? In the Balkans we know this scene by heart: deals get made about us, and we find out from press releases.