Oleshky: a convoy gets in, the truce holds, but the war isn't finished yet

According to Al Jazeera, an aid convoy entered the besieged Ukrainian city of Oleshky on Friday, 30 October. Moscow and Kyiv are, for now, respecting the six-day truce, and civilian evacuations have begun. That is what we know. The rest of the dispatch is thin: it says nothing about how many residents are affected, who organised the convoy, or the exact terms of the agreement. We will not invent them.

What the editorial angle does remind us, however, is daily life: residents without gas, without electricity, without water. Under occupation, under siege, under shelling, civilian life shrinks to a logistics of survival. This is not a "collateral effect". It is the ordinary condition of a population caught between two state machines.

A six-day truce is welcome. People getting out alive is more than welcome. No irony there. But let us ask the awkward question: why six days? A humanitarian pause of that length looks like a negotiated respite, not a peace. Both armies also benefit from such pauses, as is the rule of any truce: regroup, resupply, recalculate. We are not saying this is the case in Oleshky; the dispatch says nothing of the sort. We are saying it would be unremarkable.

Cui bono? Look wider. This war is not merely a border dispute. For Lenin, capitalism at its monopoly stage seeks outlets, raw materials and markets, and the great powers fight over the division of the world. Sanctions, arms contracts and alliances all form, according to the framework we draw on here, the political envelope of economic rivalries. Our reading: Ukraine is a terrain of that division, and its people pay the bill in running water and heating.

The diplomatic vocabulary prefers "humanitarian corridor" and "rules-based order". Neat. But an order that leaves a city without water or electricity until a truce agrees to let lorries through deserves serious scrutiny. Do the rules protect civilians, or do they protect those who write them?

And the state, in all this? Lenin described it as an instrument serving a ruling class, equipped with a public force placed above society. In Oleshky, two states claim the same population, and neither has guaranteed it the essentials. Each invokes the defence of the homeland. Lenin was already mocking those who cloaked the predatory interests of "their" bourgeoisie behind such phrases. We do not claim this is the only explanation. We say it cannot be ruled out.

What to watch: the resumption of fighting when the truce expires, the fate of those who could not leave, and reconstruction, whose contracts will go, as always, to those who have the capital. The residents, for their part, want water.