Volodymyr Zelensky arrives in Belgrade on Saturday - the first bilateral visit by a Ukrainian president to Serbia since the war began. The question everyone asked straight away was different from the agenda: does this mean Serbia is finally joining the European sanctions against Russia?

Aleksandar Vučić's answer was carefully assembled. Serbia, he said, has established its policy; it set out its positions four years ago, hasn't changed them and won't be changing them. Zelensky will say his piece. The sentence is built so that it promises nothing and refuses nothing directly either.

Three topics and one that's missing

The official agenda has three items: the European path of both countries and shared challenges, economic cooperation, and energy. Of those three, the third is the reason the whole visit is interesting. Energy is precisely where Serbia's policy of non-alignment is most expensive and hardest to sustain.

Vučić also recalled something rarely mentioned in a Western context - that Ukraine has never recognised Kosovo and has never invited representatives from Pristina to conferences it organised. That is not a footnote in Serbia's domestic ledger. It is the reason this visit can be defended at home without looking like a concession.

For us here, the mechanics are the valuable part. A state that wants into the European Union but doesn't want to accept its sanctions has to answer the question at some point instead of postponing it. So far, postponing has worked. The question is how long one visit can stand in for one answer.

Macedonia introduced the sanctions without much debate, and it didn't open a single door any faster. Serbia didn't introduce them and is still negotiating. Neither experience yields a lesson about who was smarter - it only yields the fact that conditions rarely determine outcomes. What decides is who is needed, how badly, and by whom.