Black Sea: war kills the dolphins, arms profits survive

According to Al Jazeera, the war between Russia and Ukraine is destroying marine life in the Black Sea. The outlet cites more than 120,000 dead dolphins, along with wider ecological damage, with naval mines among the elements in the picture. This report is thin: it does not detail here how the count was made, the share of each cause of death, or the timeline of the damage. We will not invent them. What is unknown still has to be established.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

First, a sober word for the victims. There are the animals, of course. But above all there are the humans: sailors, fishermen, residents of the coast, soldiers and civilians, for whom war is everyday life. A mined sea is a sea forbidden to those who live and work on it. Ecology is not a backdrop to the human tragedy; it is part of it.

Now, cui bono? Not the dolphins. Not the fishermen. Not the Ukrainian and Russian peoples, who supply the bodies and pay the taxes. The winners are the arms industries, the states that see an opportunity to extend their influence, and the groups eyeing ports, shipping lanes, grain and energy. The Black Sea is not a neutral place. It is a commercial artery and a strategic space where powers collide.

This is where the Leninist framework (the theory of imperialism) is useful. In its monopoly phase, capitalism exports capital, seeks raw materials and outlets, and clashes with its rivals in a world already divided up. Sanctions, pipelines, arms contracts, military alliances: all of this forms the political envelope of economic rivalries. Applied here, this does not mean that every mine was laid for an accountant's balance sheet. It means the war fits into a rivalry far broader than the army communiqués, and that its ecological cost is treated as collateral damage.

Official speeches, for their part, speak of defending the homeland, sovereignty, and an order based on rules. Lenin already mocked those who dressed the predatory interests of "their" bourgeoisie in grand phrases about defending the fatherland. The vocabulary has changed. The function, much less so. We are promised rules; we are gathering cetacean carcasses on the beaches.

And afterwards? The mines will not disappear when a ceasefire is signed. Demining will cost a fortune, and states will always find markets to finance it, just as they find markets for munitions. The contracts of destruction come before those of reconstruction. The same industrial and financial machinery can pocket both.

What we need, then, are verifiable data on the real extent of the damage, and above all one question: who will pick up the bill, and who will have signed the purchase orders? The dolphins did not vote for the war. Nor did the workers.