After the Olechky Ceasefire, 26 Dead: Diplomacy Buries Its Promises

According to franceinfo, Russian strikes killed 26 people in a village in south-eastern Ukraine, Olechky, the day after a ceasefire ended. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sees in it "one more proof that Russia wants neither de-escalation nor real justice," and denounces the destruction of "any hope of progress towards peace." The headline franceinfo used on the death toll changed, starting lower. What we do not know: the exact terms on which the truce ended, who broke it, and precisely who the victims are. We will not invent it.

First, the dead. Villagers, families, lives. No geopolitical reading erases them, and none should be used to exploit them.

But let us ask the awkward question: who benefits from a truce that is opened and then closed again? What we see here is our reading, not an established fact: a ceasefire treated as a tactical pause rather than a path to peace. Each side expects something from it: time to rearm, a position to consolidate, an argument to put before its backers.

For this war is not merely a border dispute. To read this conflict, the concept of imperialism remains useful, in the sense Lenin gave it: powers competing for markets, resources and spheres of influence, and whose financial capital seeks outlets beyond its borders. Sanctions, arms contracts, military alliances and energy pipelines are, as the Gazette's notes summarise, the political shell of it all. Moscow wants a buffer zone. Western capitals want a sphere of influence that does not dare speak its name, and a reconstruction market that already makes their mouths water. Caught between the two, a population that buries its dead.

Diplomacy, in this setting, does what is expected of it: it speaks of "de-escalation," of "justice," of "an order based on rules." Lovely words. The rules, however, are those the strongest write and suspend according to their interests. Lenin mocked those who cloak the appetites of "their" bourgeoisie in phrases about "defending the homeland." The vocabulary has changed. The method holds firm.

This is not about putting aggressor and victim back to back: Russian strikes are Russian strikes, and Moscow's responsibility for this death toll is, according to Kyiv, total. The point is to see who, elsewhere, collects the dividends. Arms industry order books know no truce. Defence budgets are rising everywhere in Europe, and it is neither the workers nor the conscripts who profit from that.

Peace will not come from a negotiated truce between states that have every interest in prolonging it. It will depend on the balance of forces, including the one that Russian, Ukrainian and European peoples manage, or fail, to impose on their governments. For now, Olechky counts its dead. And the chancelleries draft their next communiqué.