Dnipro: 14 dead at the railway station, and the chancelleries reach for their toolbox

According to franceinfo, a Russian attack on the railway station in Dnipro, Ukraine, killed 14 people. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denounced a "horrible strike" on social media and called on America and Europe for "just and resolute actions in the face of Russian escalation." The dispatch says nothing more: no toll of the wounded, no detail on the weapon used, no indication of what measures the West might take. We will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, the dead. Fourteen people lost their lives in a place of passage, a railway station. No analysis makes them any less real, and none should be used to step over them.

But the appeal that follows the strike is political. Cui bono? Let us start with what we know: Kyiv is asking for action, and "action" in diplomatic language means sanctions, weapons, financing. It is the usual toolbox. Our working concept: these instruments are the political shell of an economic competition. Sanctions, arms contracts, trade blocs, military alliances: each great power defends its markets, its resources, its sphere of influence. Lenin saw in this the logic of a monopoly capitalism that exports its capital and divides the world among rival blocs (our concept note on imperialism and finance capital).

This does not mean the Dnipro strike is "explained" by finance. That would be crude, and we have no evidence to claim it. It means the response will not fall from the sky of morality. It will be arbitrated by states which are, to borrow Lenin's phrase, instruments in the service of the ruling classes. And these states have their own accounts to settle: who will supply the shells, who will finance the reconstruction, who will gain what in exchange for their "solidarity."

Lenin also pointed to the old trick: covering the defence of the predatory interests of "one's own" bourgeoisie with phrases about defending the homeland (our translation, from The State and Revolution). Today the formula is called "rules-based order." An admirable order, whose rules bend remarkably well to the stockpiles of industrialists and the order books.

The Ukrainian people are suffering an aggression, and no serious person disputes it. But the left's question is not only "what to do about Moscow?" It is also: who pays the bill for the war, and who collects the dividends? Military budgets are rising; social budgets are waiting their turn.

What we do not yet know: what concrete response Washington and Brussels will give, and on what conditions. We will follow the contracts as closely as the communiqués. The communiqués mourn the dead. The contracts count the profits.