Zelensky in Berlin: peace is being negotiated between the great powers, not in Kyiv

According to RFI, Volodymyr Zelensky was in Berlin this Tuesday, 3 November. He took part in a security conference and met Chancellor Friedrich Merz. The two leaders discussed the upcoming diplomatic meetings that are supposed to open a way out of the war, and insisted on Europe's essential role. The Ukrainian president says he hopes the US-mediated discussions will lead to a meeting with Vladimir Putin.

That is what we know. It is not much. The dispatch says nothing about the timetable, the content of the talks or the concessions under consideration. What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

The word "mediation" deserves a closer look. A neutral mediator has no stake in the affair. Washington has one, and a big one: markets, resources, spheres of influence, outlets for its arms industry. Cui bono? Those who weigh enough at the table to dictate the map. Ukraine is invited, but the menu does not come from Ukraine.

This is the logic Lenin described: finance capital, at its monopoly stage, seeks outlets, raw materials and territories, and the great powers divide the world up or redivide it when the balance of forces shifts. Sanctions, arms contracts and alliances are the political wrapping of that rivalry. A negotiation over the border is also, whether or not anyone says so, a negotiation over who will exploit what, and who will rebuild, with which loans and for whose profit.

Berlin is not there by chance. When Merz and Zelensky proclaim Europe's "essential" role, read: European capitals do not want to be spectators of a deal struck between Washington and Moscow. They want their share, whether in security, reconstruction or military orders. The language of defending law and sovereignty serves, as ever, to dress up interests. Lenin mocked those who cloak the predatory aims of "their" bourgeoisie in phrases about defending the homeland. The trick has not aged a day.

None of this erases the primary reality: a war that has cost the lives of an immense number of soldiers and civilians, destroyed cities and uprooted entire families. They are the ones who pay for every month of delay, and they are not the ones who will sign. Neither Ukrainian workers nor Russian workers were consulted on the price of peace, any more than they were on the war.

A Zelensky-Putin meeting, if it happens, will be presented as a triumph of diplomacy. Better to ask the right questions: which territories will be ceded or frozen, which guarantees will be paid for by whom, and which companies will win the contracts? As long as these answers stay in the shadows, "peace" is just a carve-up in progress.