Black Sea: Erdogan plays mediator, shipowners count their premiums

According to Al Jazeera, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan received Volodymyr Zelensky in Istanbul on 31 October. He urged Russia and Ukraine to end attacks in the Black Sea. The two leaders agreed to work towards a new grain corridor. That is what we know. The dispatch says nothing about the terms, the timetable, the guarantees or Moscow's position. Everything else is our reading.

Cui bono? Let us ask early, the answer is simple. A sea route is not a charity. It is a commercial artery, and whoever controls it collects the toll. Ukrainian wheat heads for markets that can pay. Grain traders, merchants, insurers, shipowners and the banks that finance them have a direct interest in ships getting through. World hunger serves as the banner, the cargo as the engine.

Turkey, for its part, holds the straits. It understood long ago that being indispensable to both camps pays better than choosing one. Erdogan poses as arbiter, hosts the Ukrainian president, and keeps his rank as an intermediate power selling its good offices to the highest bidder. This is not neutrality, it is a rent of position. Let us say it plainly: "mediation" is here the polite name for a political toll.

Lenin's framework remains useful, without mechanically forcing it onto the facts. For Lenin, capitalism at its monopoly stage exports capital, seeks outlets and raw materials, and divides the world between great powers and blocs of enterprises. Sanctions, pipelines, arms contracts, military alliances: the political envelope of these economic rivalries (our translation of our briefing notes, which paraphrase this thesis). The Black Sea is a textbook case. Grain, ports, marine insurance and export routes are spheres-of-influence stakes, not logistical details.

We will be told that each side is defending its homeland. Lenin had a formula for this: phrases about "defence of the fatherland" serve to cover the predatory interests of "its own" bourgeoisie (our free translation, The State and Revolution). Whether Kyiv, Moscow or Ankara speak of sovereignty, food security or peace, let us look at who ships, who insures, who collects.

What we do not yet know weighs heavily. Who will guarantee the ships' safety? Which powers, which fleets, which banks? Will Moscow accept a scheme in which Istanbul plays the guardian? Sailors, dockers and farmers, meanwhile, pay first for the war, whatever the corridor. Arms manufacturers, for their part, do not complain about a conflict that lasts. The day a corridor is announced, the commercial clauses should be read before the peace communiqués.