Russian strike, 29 dead: in Abu Dhabi, they'll negotiate without those being bombed

According to France 24, Russia bombed Ukraine again in the night from Monday to Tuesday, 3 November, a day after an attack that killed at least 29 people in the south-east of the country. Volodymyr Zelensky strongly condemned the strike and accused Moscow of torpedoing any "progress towards peace". The report by the channel's correspondent in Kyiv, Emmanuelle Chaze, covers it. What we do not know, from this dispatch alone: the city hit, the exact nature of the target, the detail of the victims. We will not invent it.

First, the dead. Twenty-nine at least. People, not "negotiating parameters". Every political reading begins with that respect.

Next comes the question the eight o'clock news avoids: who benefits from this cycle? Our reading, for what it's worth: this war is not merely a conflict between two states. It is a rivalry between powers over markets, resources and spheres of influence. Lenin saw in this the logic of monopoly capitalism: the big groups and the banks seek outlets beyond their borders, states carve up and fight over the world, and war is the continuation of that. Sanctions, arms contracts, military alliances, energy routes: so many political shells around very concrete economic interests.

Let us apply this without mysticism. Strikes serve a balance of forces before a negotiating table. Hitting hard before talking is an old state reflex: one negotiates with what one has destroyed. And, on the Kyiv side as on the Moscow side, each camp presents the interests of its ruling class as "defence of the homeland". Lenin was already sneering at such phrases which, since 1914, have dressed up the appetites of "their own" bourgeoisie (our translation, after The State and Revolution). The formula ages badly for those who hoped it had become old-fashioned.

The talks announced in Abu Dhabi, about which the dispatch says nothing precise, are the other side of the same coin. Who will be seated there? Governments, diplomats, state advisers who defend first their national capital and their allies. Those who sleep in cellars, the miners, the women workers, the conscripts, have no seat. There will be talk of guarantees, lines, reconstruction. The word "reconstruction" should, moreover, prick up the ears: it is a market, and markets have candidates.

Who profits from rearmament? Arms manufacturers, everywhere, whose order books fill while social budgets tighten. That is what the "peace" in a suit never mentions.

We do not claim to know what will be said in Abu Dhabi. We know only who will not be invited: those who pay for the war with their lives and their wages. As long as the decision remains in the hands of states and the circles they serve, peace will look like a contract. Not like a liberation.