Kherson: 72 hours of truce, and then what? Olechky's civilians are being used as bargaining chips

According to Le Figaro, the Russian and Ukrainian authorities have agreed to suspend fighting for 72 hours. The aim: to evacuate civilians trapped in Olechky, on the other bank of the Dnieper. In Kherson, the paper reports, residents speak of a "day of celebration". One can understand them. Three days without bombs is an enormous thing for anyone living under fire.

What the dispatch does not yet tell us: who is overseeing the evacuation, how many people are concerned, what guarantees exist, and what happens after the 72 hours. We do not know. Nothing either about possible intermediaries. Caution, then.

The question we ask first remains: who benefits from the arrangement? The civilians, first and foremost, obviously. No serious person will complain about that. But let us read the set-up as it stands: two state apparatuses are negotiating, between themselves, the fate of people whom their war has left on a bank that has become a trap. The ceasefire is not a rupture. It is a managed parenthesis, limited in time, in the service of a logistical operation.

This is our reading, not an established fact: this truce shows that states know how to agree when it comes to managing the damage, and never when it comes to preventing it. The same capitals that suddenly discover humanitarian urgency continue to wage a war whose stakes go far beyond Olechky: territory, resources, spheres of influence, place in the European order.

The Leninist framework helps here, without magic. For Lenin, rivalry between great powers for markets, raw materials and spheres of influence leads to war; sanctions, arms contracts and alliances are the political dressing (this is the summary offered by the Gazette). Applied to Ukraine: behind the "defence of the homeland" lie bloc interests. Lenin already mocked those who cloaked the designs of "their" bourgeoisie in fine phrases about defending the fatherland. The vocabulary has changed; the function has not.

Who pays? The inhabitants of the left bank, displaced, the soldiers sent to the front, the taxpayers who finance it. Who cashes in? The arms industries, whose order books suffer no 72-hour truce. Here too, we reason in structural terms: the dispatch contains no figure on this point.

We will be sold this pause as proof that diplomacy works. Let us say instead that it proves what it costs not to use it sooner. Three days to get civilians out of a trap: good, and it must work. But an evacuation corridor is not peace. As long as war remains an instrument of rivalry between powers, truces will remain intermissions. Watch the fourth day.