It has become a case joke told by the Albanian prime minister, Ed Ramaat the Bled Strategic Forum, in Slovenia, in front of hundreds of people and the prime ministers of Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Rama, at the end of his speech, addresses his interlocutors with a harmless “I don’t know if you’ve heard that Russia wants to unify their time zones, since they have a nine-hour difference between the two ends of the country”. And then the story: “The prime minister goes to Putin and says: ‘We have a problem. There was my family on vacation, I called them to say goodnight but it was already morning with them. I called Olaf Scholz to wish him a birthday but he said it would be the next day. I called Xi Jinping to wish him a New Year but he told me it was still the old year.’” At that point replies Putin: “’Yeah, that happened to me too. I called Prigozhin’s family to offer condolences but the plane had not yet taken off‘”.
