"Fresh graves will always touch you / no matter where they are dug," Jacek Kleyff [the Polish poet and singer] sang years ago. It is a bit like the experience of people who spend consecutive winter nights in an unheated tent, hit by an icy wind. Often their situation is known to us, so obvious and close that we think of them almost constantly. For example, it is hard to rid our heads of images of those demonstrators from Kiev's Maidan or the children whose apartment block in Kharkiv was destroyed by a Russian bomb.

  Similarly, it is hard not to think about those unfortunates who ended up in tents in the name of a complex, distant, probably manipulated case and are now sitting listening to the košava (the icy wind that typically blows from the south-east in the Balkans during autumn and winter) pounding against their canvas on some forgotten by God Brnjak or Jarinje pass.

  Because they're freezing.

  The situation in the northern part of Kosovo has yet to escalate to a height where it hits website and portal headlines For now, the yellow and red fonts sound the alarm only in the online editions of the Serbian and Albanian press and the governments of Macedonia, Greece and Hungary are worrying but perhaps these worries will fade away and the whole thing will go away.

  After all, every day, there are high-level talks. Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell and the US Special Envoy for the Western Balkans Gabriel Escobar hardly leave their phones. And most importantly, despite the blockade of the quasi-border that has been going on for over a week now, no shots have been fired. Nevertheless, in private conversations, the analysts agree that this is the most serious and escalating conflict in the Kosovo region since the NATO intervention nearly a quarter of a century ago.

  And on top of that, Dejan Pantić still hasn't gotten his blood pressure medication. So really anything can happen.

  Let's start with the Illyrians

  Explaining the situation in Kosovo is always a challenge for journalists and columnists. Extremely complex layers of interest, multiply-worded party and institutional names, two languages…! For example, on one side of the Ibar River all surnames end with -ić, while on the other, every vowel has an umlaut. And the perplexity doesn’t end there: what one side calls "rebellion", the other considers an "uprising"; "independence" is translated as "separatism"; "guerrilla warfare" as "terrorism" (even a simple word like "police" is also translated as "terrorism").

It’s not easy to determine just where to begin the historical narrative. Should it be from the Illyrian and Slavic settlements after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, or from the 14th century and the destabilization of the Balkans by the Ottoman Turks? Or perhaps (in an effort, dear reader, "to make things easier for you ") from the end of the 20th century ("On September 29, 1999, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution No. 1199 ...")? Either way, it is more or less guaranteed that no one is likely to read such an article to the end.

  Analysts have it easier: they can hide a lot in maps, footnotes and charts. Besides, no one demands that they arrive at a conclusion.

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    So, let us proceed. The latest act of the drama (not the second, not the seventh, certainly a much higher number) began on November 5 this year, when the Serbian party active in Kosovo, the Serb List (SL), decided to withdraw its representatives from parliament and the government. Within a day, members of municipal councils, judges, prosecutors and policemen (and later teachers too) had resigned in four "Serbian" municipalities of northern Kosovo. That is, practically the entire elite, or at least all representatives of Serbs present in Kosovo's institutions. Full boycott.

  A Band-Aid on a geopolitical wound

  What was it about? Ah, about the license plates. Because with these license plates it went like this... The Kosovo authorities demanded the replacement of the old (pre-1999) license plates with local ones. And the vast majority of Serbs living in Kosovo drive on Serbian plates as a demonstration of their independence (from Pristina) and attachment to the Motherland. The majority have even registered their cars in modern Serbia. Moreover, this arrangement is the subject of a special agreement signed between Belgrade and Pristina in 2016 brokered under the high auspices of the West that specifically made it possible to use the license plates of an unrecognized country (Serbian in Kosovo, Kosovan in Serbia) if the country's code is covered with some adhesive plaster.

  The intergovernmental agreement does not specify the size of the plaster. It doesn’t say whether it is to be a Band-Aid or just self-adhesive. And what about the transparent ones?

  It doesn’t matter. The point is that the license plates from before 1999 still carry the letters "YU" [Yugoslavia] and a flag with a star. They sting the eyes, like the portrait of Tsar Nicholas II on the wall of the school in Siemiatycze in 1938 [small town in eastern Poland] ...

  There are several thousand such vehicles on the roads of Kosovo. Kosovo authorities have had enough. Who is in charge here after all? At first, they decided to introduce the ban on August 1. Then in a masterstroke of procrastination, they changed it to November 1, and so the troubles started…

Did I mention "procrastination"? In reality, procrastination is only about to start… Up to November 21, the owners of the "Yu-license plates" were being warned, until January 21, 2023, they face a fine. Thereafter, between January 21 and April 21, the Kosovo authorities will be presenting them with new license plates. Only afterwards, cars with old plates are to be confiscated. Such a plan presents lots of opportunities for arguments!

  War about the color of the silk

  These license plates are, of course, completely unimportant. The same dispute could have been started over inscriptions on mailboxes, school textbooks, street names or license plates on railway wagons (some of which have taken place). As a matter of fact, a dispute in Kosovo can start over anything, be it an element of infrastructure or superstructure, in effect, over anything that could indicate "whose land is this", i.e. win a point in the argument that will never be solved. As in Zbigniew Herbert's [the Polish poet’s] fairy tale about a soldier: “That was the war. About the most important thing. Should the banners be made of purple or blue silk?

  The situation on the border between Kosovo and Serbia is one of those that have no solution. Or rather, it is one of those for which the solution created was known in advance to be temporary – just a Band-Aid stopping bloodshed until: a) local bread eaters are turned into angels; b) the contentious issue will grow stale and lose its relevance; c) there is a significant change in the force potential of one of the parties.

  At this point, a political philosopher (especially one from the Cynic School) might retort that any international agreement is temporary. And in the broadest sense, he would be right! Countries perish easily. Even the cardinals remind the pope (although he rules the oldest country in Europe), sic transit gloria mundi ["Thus passes the glory of the world" -- the phrase used in the ritual of papal coronation ceremonies between 1409 and 1963, as a reminder of the transitory nature of life and earthly honors], in the dry crackling of a burning bunch of hemp. How long do international treaties last? The Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, established by the Treaty of Windsor in 1386 and still in force, is the oldest known to the historians of diplomacy, and yes, it is very old but has very little competition.

True, treaties don’t last long but most deals are made with a measure of goodwill, with a generation or two in mind, a in hopes that they will help get rid of at least the worst of the problems. And there are also other agreements, such as that after WWI about the “free cities”, the Dayton Accords (ending the war in Bosnia, though, unfortunately, not as durable as one might wish), or the Kosovo agreement. From the very beginning, all of them resembled the clock on the town hall tower after the passage of the Red Army: half the gears and the big hand are missing, it has to be oiled, the hours need to be changed manually and prayers have to be said in hopes that it will work.

  All because the Serbs in the northern part of Kosovo (in the four municipalities cut off from the rest of the country by the Ibar River and neighboring Serbia) simply do not intend to submit to Pristina while Pristina does not intend to accept their display of de facto independence. And that's it.

  And that's why, when the Kosovo-Serbian policemen, teachers and, most importantly, councilors resigned, Pristina had no choice but to hold temporary elections in the northern communities on December 18 and introduce "its own", purely Kosovan police there.

  A broken ballot box

  So the local Serbs had no choice but to demonstrate their dissatisfaction in front of the electoral commissions that had just started their activities.

As they were demonstrating, they began to jostle. A scuffle began and a plexiglass ballot box was broken. And among those jostling, was Dejan Pantić, a Kosovo-Serbian policeman who had earlier resigned (evil tongues had claimed that despite his police tenure, he was paid by Belgrade).

  On Friday, December 10, Kosovan police arrested Pantić on charges of terrorism and violation of the constitutional order. Now nobody knows where he is. But he has stents. So both the US special envoy and the President of Serbia are now trying to make sure he will receive medications for high blood pressure and immune response.

  Meanwhile, Kosovo's President Vjosa Osmani announced she was postponing the scheduled local elections until April when it’s warmer. Next, Serbia’s President Vučić placed the police and army on high alert. Then Osmani also put the police and army on high alert. And KFOR forces (the NATO-led international peacekeeping force in Kosovo) have also been put on high alert. Each side accuse the other of terrorism and hostage-taking, as they call for moderation and avoiding provocations. Both just want the rule of law. Traffic between the four municipalities in the north and the rest of Kosovo is on hold. At the Jarinje Pass it is minus eight degrees.

And all of this could have been dismissed as yet another local Balkan whirlpool (what a lovely whirlpool that for a quarter of a century has been fueling a sense of impermanence, unlike any known by the inhabitants of the Western Territories), were it not for another – not insignificant - element.

  Wagner's Eagles

  Russia. Russia, which supports Serbia so fervently that a week ago, on December 8, the Wagner Group announced the opening of a "new cultural, information and training center, called ‘Eagles’", in Belgrade. According to the statement of the Wagner Group, the "Eagles" are tasked with strengthening ties of friendship, cooperation in the field of defense and prosecuting "Russian liberals conducting anti-state activities in Serbia." Serbian national groups are already expressing hope that if anybody could restore order in Kosovo and come to the aid of the oppressed Slavs, it would be the Wagner Group.

  Of course, the probability of starting a fight (likely partisan and of low intensity) between Serbian forces supported by the Wagner Group and Kosovan forces supported by NATO is low. If this scenario looks as if it was written by a Polish geopolitics expert, running his own YouTube channel, seemingly convinced that the world is built like Lego bricks: the pivot is here, a landing party there, and over there lies the Transnistria-Hungary-Serbia solidarity axis, via which Russian tanks can go as far as Camp Bondsteel HQ [the KFOR operation headquarters in eastern Kosovo], Tirana and the Adriatic…

  Of course, this is a nonsense. However, apart from the YouTube geopolitics experts, there is another group of people who need to pay attention, That group is made up of the quartermasters and logistics personnel whose job it is to anticipate and be prepared for the most unlikely contingencies, ready to meet the occasion with guaranteed supplies, food and ammunition stocks plus the necessary logistics and reserves. So now, these, rather than to Jasionka [Poland’s airport and a gateway for arms support from the West into Ukraine] and points further East, will fly to Camp Bondsteel.

  And that's why it's so important for Dejan Pantić to get his anti-artherosclerosis drugs.  Judging from his photos, however, he should probably blame himself for his health: he looks like he would trade half of Kosovo for a good roast pig.

  –Wojciech Stanisławski

TVP WEEKLY. Editorial team and journalists

 –translated by Agnieszka Rakoczy