Kostiantynivka: the Russian army advances, and the war of blocs goes on

The facts first. According to Le Monde, which cites Ukrainian analysts working with DeepState's open-source data, the Russian army has recently advanced in the north-west of Kostiantynivka. The city sits at the southern tip of the "fortified belt" of Donetsk oblast, an area Moscow has been besieging for a year. That is all the dispatch establishes. We do not know the scale of the gain, its human cost or its real reach. The rest is our reading.

A year of siege for one town. The communiqués speak of "progress"; the residents and the soldiers speak of ruins and dead. Respect to those who pay for this pace. The question remains: who collects the dividends?

Cui bono? Not the conscripts, on either side. This war is, in our view, an episode of inter-imperialist conflict: two blocs fighting over a zone of influence, its land, its industry, its transit corridors. The Donbas is not just a flag. It is coal, steel and logistics. Lenin asked the question in 1914-1916: what other means than war can resolve the gap between productive power and the division of the world among capitals? He posed it for the Europe of his day. It sounds strangely current (our translation, after L'impérialisme, stade suprême du capitalisme).

The framework is familiar. Sanctions, arms contracts, alliances: the political wrapping of economic rivalries. Le Monde, moreover, runs in the same live feed a story on Russian diesel imports into the United States that "fizzle out". Sanctions, then, are also a matter of markets. You sanction your rival's oil, then look to see who delivers in its place.

Then there is the state. In the Leninist view, it is not the neutral arbiter that speeches about a "rules-based order" like to praise. It is the instrument of a class. It mobilises bodies, requisitions industry, steers budgets. The positional war around Kostiantynivka, with its fortified lines and slow attrition, is a war of matériel: shells, drones, munitions. Who makes them? Who sells them? Who finances them through debt? Every month of siege adds orders to order books already full. Rearmament has its shareholders, and they are not in the trenches.

We will be told that Ukraine is defending itself against an invasion, which is true, and that Russia pursues objectives of power, which is also true. Both things hold together. An attacked people does not erase the interests of the great powers around it, which back it, or covet it. The "peace" promised by the chancelleries will, too, be a carve-up: of zones, of contracts, of reconstruction.

What we do not yet know: whether this advance changes anything in the balance of the front, or merely lengthens the siege. The dispatch does not say. One thing is certain: as long as the war pays, it will find financiers. To those who endure it, the conclusions are for you to draw.