Contents
- Sanctions as a Commodity
- Yalta Without Yalta
- Money Instead of Coercion
- The War Against Infrastructure
- The Black Sea: The Insurance Policy as a Weapon
- The Worker in Someone Else’s Economy
- Ukraine: Between Suppliers and Buyers
- What Follows From This?
On saturday 17 October, delegates from several countries ostentatiously rose and walked out of a meeting of the IMF steering committee in Bangkok when the Russian finance minister took the floor. It was a gesture designed for the cameras: behold civilised Europe, refusing to sit at the same table as the barbarian. The day before, the US president had signed an executive order suspending a substantial part of the new sanctions against that very same barbarian. The right hand of the “collective West” supposedly did not know what the left was doing. In reality, the right hand knew perfectly well; it was the left that was putting on a show for the public.
This is the face of world politics in the autumn of 2026. On the main stage, a play unfolds against a backdrop of “values”, “unity” and “resolve”. Behind the scenes, the bargaining continues. Our task is to strip the actors of their make-up and show the working class who is footing the bill for both the spectacle and the haggling.
Sanctions as a Commodity
Let us begin with what the bourgeois press discusses in hushed tones. According to reports by Agentstvo, following a phone call between Trump and Putin on 9 October, Washington authorised trade in Russian diesel, discussed deals involving Lukoil’s foreign assets and the participation of an American investor in Nord Stream projects, and considered unfreezing Russian assets and resuming European purchases of Russian energy. The reports also say that Washington is demanding that Kyiv halt its strikes on Russian oil refineries. For now, all of this remains rumour, and we will have to wait for confirmation in official documents. Yet the rumours are telling: no one seems surprised that such deals are even on the table.
Take the hearings held in the British House of Commons on 20 October. According to Isaac Levi’s estimates, Russia’s revenues from fossil-fuel exports in September were about 30% lower than in January 2021. The fall in physical export volumes, however, was much smaller than the drop in revenues: oil had to be shipped along longer routes and sold mainly to India, China and Turkey – to buyers who know how to drive a hard bargain. Over the first nine months of the year, oil and gas taxes fell from 25 % to 18 % of Russian federal budget revenues; they had once accounted for between a third and a half. The Hormuz crisis proved to be a “golden ticket” for Moscow, in the words of the same expert, until the strikes on refineries wiped out part of the windfall.
And here comes the juiciest part. According to the same hearings, around 60 % of Russian coal is carried on ships insured in the UK. In the first nine months of the year, these shipments were worth £7.9 billion. The rules, it seems, permit such operations as long as the price cap is observed. The City of London is at war with Russia while continuing to line its pockets with insurance premiums. There is your “war of civilisations”: the knights of “values” on the front line, while insurance policies are written in the rear, without so much as a lunch break. Another expert, Craig Kennedy, explained with commendable frankness how the sanctions policy had been designed: policymakers had to choose between limiting volumes and reducing revenues, while removing Russian oil from the market altogether was considered unrealistic. In other words, sanctions stop where the profits of their own capitalists begin.
The law of value does not write executive orders, but it sets the limits within which they are drafted. Sanctions redistribute advantages and losses: London insurers, Turkish refineries, Indian and Chinese buyers, Russian exporters, and American contenders for future deals all find themselves in very different positions. British proposals – to lower the price cap, impose a 5–10 % tax on shipping insurance and put pressure on Turkish refineries – diverge from Washington’s move towards easing sanctions. The reason is not a difference in “values” (the values are the same in Washington and London, even if calculated in different currencies), but the difference between the interests represented by each state apparatus.
We should stress, however, that this is our hypothesis. To establish the influence of a particular faction of capital, it is not enough to show that it benefited from a decision. We must trace who demanded what and examine what the states actually did. We will continue this investigation as more evidence emerges. For now, it is enough to note that the state does not stand above capital; it manoeuvres among competing capitals.
Yalta Without Yalta
The play’s second act promises to be even more striking than the first.
On 20 October in Oslo, Witkoff, Zelensky, Finnish President Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Støre, joined by representatives of European capitals, the EU and NATO, discussed two issues, according to the Financial Times and Axios: Ukraine’s future – security guarantees, integration into a “united” Europe, investment and post-war reconstruction – and the terms of a “lasting peace” with Russia, including a “new European security architecture” and possible economic cooperation with Moscow. Jared Kushner, the US president’s son-in-law, took part by video link. Støre mentioned both territorial issues and sanctions. Note the sequence: first “reconstruction” and “investment”, then “cooperation with Moscow”. As usual, the carving up of the pie has begun before the war is over.
At the same time, The New York Times reports that Witkoff is bringing Zelensky a different message: stop insisting on the return of the occupied eastern territories, because Ukraine, too, will be able to “make money” from a deal drawn up largely on Russia’s terms. The phrase “make money” deserves particular attention: it reveals the language spoken behind closed doors. The message is backed by very material pressure. Starlink services have been restricted, problems have arisen with warnings of incoming missile strikes, and deliveries of Patriot interceptors have been delayed. You want “guarantees” and “support”? First, let us see how you behave. Such is the price of an “alliance” in a world where an “ally” can be cut off from communications.
Old Europe, meanwhile, is preparing its own phone call to the Kremlin, according to Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman, with two options on offer: a freeze along the front line in exchange for a guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO, or the transfer to Russia of the part of Donbas it has yet to capture, while Kyiv joins the alliance. Sweet tea or washed hands – take your pick, but the bill goes to someone else.
Now for the main point. According to The Wall Street Journal, on 9 October Putin proposed a trilateral meeting with Trump and Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Shenzhen on 18–19 November. A former Russian intelligence officer cited by the paper described the idea as a second Yalta Conference: the great powers would divide the world into spheres of influence, while none of the “minor” players – including a lumbering Brussels – would have a seat at the table. This is the assessment of an anonymous source. Officially, all that has been confirmed is that the idea was discussed. Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says there is no agenda and no agreement, while US Secretary of State Marco Rubio cautions that the meeting has not been finalised.
Yet the proposal fits neatly with what Moscow was seeking even before the invasion. In December 2021, Russia presented the US and NATO with draft treaties demanding that the alliance’s expansion be halted and its military presence rolled back to the configuration of 1997. Those demands were rejected. Now Moscow is proposing essentially the same deal, but with a different cast of participants. A victory?
Trump’s response on 19 October is worth remembering. He said he was ready to meet, but “not so much for the sake of Ukraine”. On Ukraine, he said, Russia had “behaved normally”; what he really wanted to discuss was nuclear weapons and disarmament. Beijing, through its Foreign Ministry, called trilateral talks on nuclear disarmament “unfair, unreasonable and unrealistic”, pointing out that China’s arsenal is significantly smaller than those of the US and Russia. Nevertheless, according to The Washington Post, Chinese representatives asked Washington for clarification about its plans for the meeting. China dislikes the proposed agenda, but does not want to miss the meeting itself.
We see no need to invoke a conspiracy. What we see is bargaining. Each side has its own goods and its own calculations. Washington steers the discussion towards an area where it holds an advantage: strategic weapons. Beijing refuses to limit its arsenal while it remains far smaller than those of the other two powers. Moscow seeks to turn its military position into internationally recognised rights. The only point on which all three agree is that decisions should be made without consulting those whose fate is being decided.
But a shared interest in excluding third parties does not yet amount to collusion. A partition of the world acceptable to all three predators will become possible only when each believes that the balance of power has been secured for the long term. The present balance offers no such certainty. Yalta in 1945 became possible because the war had revealed the victors. A new Yalta, if it happens, would be an attempt to put on paper what has not yet been settled on the battlefield.
One more detail deserves mention. Witkoff is due to arrive in St Petersburg on 21 October. Over the same days, Chinese Premier Li Qiang is in the city for the 31st regular meeting between the heads of the Russian and Chinese governments. Such meetings take place every year, so they should not be treated as evidence of a conspiracy. But the coincidence is intriguing: Moscow is bargaining on two fronts at once, and the person sitting across the table knows perfectly well that it is doing so. Levi also notes that China has gained considerable leverage over Russia and is using it to buy raw materials at discounted prices. One “partner” in the anti-American camp is buying from another “partner”. Between these “partners”, the bargaining is fought to the death.
In these circumstances, the Kremlin has begun speaking through Andrey Sushentsov, a member of the expert council attached to Russia’s Security Council. In an interview with TASS, Sushentsov declared that the US had behaved “treacherously” towards Ukraine and its European allies, “saddling them with this burden without warning”. This is the same Kremlin that until recently accused the Biden administration of betraying Kyiv. The tone changed precisely when the administration in the White House changed. Betrayal, as we see, is a strictly situational category, determined by who occupies the Oval Office. Alliance commitments turn out to be not a moral duty but a budget line, to be reconsidered whenever the balance of benefits shifts.
Sushentsov also announced that Russia was waging a war of attrition. Both sides keep insisting that they are wearing down the enemy. We propose testing that claim against the figures, because words are cheap in this war, as they always are. Have the imperialist predators become so exhausted that they are ready to start dividing up prey that is still resisting?
Money Instead of Coercion
The figures come from the same British parliamentary hearings, and they tell us a great deal. One qualification is necessary: the experts, as we have noted, advocate putting pressure on Moscow, and their political prescriptions – “regime change” and “incentives for elites” – reflect the positions of their governments. But the evidence they presented is worth examining independently of those prescriptions.
Nigel Gould-Davies estimates that military spending accounts for roughly 40 % of the federal budget. According to him, the money is being drawn from a National Wealth Fund that has been nearly depleted, from higher taxes, from cuts to other budget items, and from a growing deficit financed through Russian banks. Nine regions have cut the bonuses paid to people who sign army contracts, because the Kremlin had shifted these costs onto regional budgets. Kennedy described the credit boom of 2022–2024: defence companies borrowed heavily to expand production, and the budget must now allocate funds to cover the interest on those debts.
In other words, the structure resembles a financial pyramid. As long as new investors keep coming in, it holds together; when they stop, it collapses. The only question is who will be crushed beneath it. Our guess is those who still have something to lose besides their chains.
The most interesting point is something else. As the same expert observed, the Russian state is trying not so much to force people to go to war as to buy their consent. Army recruitment advertisements do not say, “The country needs you”. They say, “Here is how much you will get”. Enlisting in the army has become part of the labour market. The result is a severe labour shortage, factories operating around the clock, wages rising faster than productivity, and inflation that feeds on this growth and sends the bill to everyone else.
Contract soldiers are recruited mainly in poor regions, where the payments can equal a year’s wages; in Moscow and St Petersburg, by contrast, few are interested in such offers. In remote regions, according to Gould-Davies, a “hidden mobilisation” is under way: people burdened by chronic debt are pushed towards signing contracts. According to Levi, citizens of around forty countries are fighting in the Russian army, some of them recruited through deception. And what work is anyone ever recruited for honestly?
What matters to us here? The state, acting as the collective buyer of labour power, pays a high price for a particular commodity: the willingness to risk one’s life. Coercion does not disappear as a result; it merely changes form. Debt, poverty and regional unemployment perform the same function as a mobilisation order would under different circumstances. A person is left to choose between starvation and the front and, as a free seller of labour power, “voluntarily” chooses the latter.
This is how capital liberates the proletarian: it frees him from everything except the need to sell his labour power. The costs of recruitment fall on the budget and, through inflation, on all other wage workers. Bourgeois analysts call it a “staffing shortage”, but in essence it amounts to the physical depletion of the very source of surplus value – a subject we will address in the third issue of our journal. The experts see this as a weak point of the “regime” and hope to put pressure on the “elites”. We see something else: workers pay for the war in Moscow, in Kyiv and in Milan.
Let us step back from the narrative for a moment. Beneath the cautious wording of the parliamentary hearings, we can discern further indications of the divisions within the Russian ruling elite that we have already noted. Kiriyenko has clashed with the FSB “hawks” over internet restrictions; VEB’s chief economist has stated that Russia cannot win a war of attrition; and Sberbank’s chief has said that everyone wants the war to end as soon as possible.
We have grounds to suspect that a “pragmatic” faction exists in Moscow that would benefit more from a return to Western markets. For now, however, we have indirect indications, not established facts. One thing is clear: there is vacillation and there are cracks in the ruling class. What is missing is a proletarian party capable of acting on them.
The War Against Infrastructure
While diplomats bargain, drones continue to strike. On 18 October, according to press reports, Ukraine launched large-scale attacks on Russian territory, targeting oil infrastructure in St Petersburg, an Ozon logistics hub and a VK digital infrastructure facility. Russian authorities reported intercepting drones and announced that one person had been killed and others injured. The extent of the damage to each facility remains to be established separately. During the same period, Zelensky stated that Russian forces had attacked Ukrainian energy, oil and gas facilities 76 times in a single week, including substations in several regions. This was a Ukrainian assessment reported by Reuters and, like any assessment issued by a party to the war, requires verification.
These events differ in their targets and circumstances, but together they reveal a common trend: infrastructure is becoming one of the principal targets of military strikes. Society’s productive forces are not just factories and machinery. They include roads and substations, ports and warehouses, technology and knowledge, the organisation of labour and, above all, the worker himself. A substation supplies power to both a factory floor and a residential neighbourhood; a port connects production to the world market; a warehouse links trade to transport; a data centre supports payments and deliveries. A data centre, it should be noted, is not simply a “room full of computers”: one may serve commercial operations, another state or military systems. The significance of an attack depends on precisely what it disables.
War strikes at capital in three ways: it destroys the means of production, puts them out of operation and devalues them. A destroyed facility loses its value; an enterprise that survives may stand idle without electricity or components; a road may remain intact but no longer carry its former volume of traffic. Society loses the labour previously expended and must expend additional labour to restore what has been lost. For an individual capital, the destruction of a competitor’s productive capacity may be a stroke of luck: a rival is eliminated, markets open up. But private gain does not compensate for social losses.
We should recall Grossman and Mattick: devaluation can temporarily improve the conditions for accumulation for some capitals, but destruction in itself does not resolve the contradictions of capitalist reproduction. It destroys accumulated social labour and worsens the position of those who created it. The war against infrastructure is a war against the material foundations of social reproduction, waged by those who in peacetime so readily lecture us about “development” and “modernisation”.
The Black Sea: The Insurance Policy as a Weapon
The war at sea produces the same result. In October, attacks on merchant vessels in the western Black Sea led to the deaths and disappearances of sailors. According to reports published on 15 October, seven sailors were listed as missing following strikes on two tankers off the Romanian coast. The analytical firm Ambrey linked a series of attacks to vessels involved in trade through Danube ports and assessed the likelihood that the strikes had originated in Russia as high. This is an assessment, not an established fact; intellectual honesty requires us to distinguish between the two.
What lies behind these events? The Black Sea connects Ukrainian and other regional ports to the world market. Threats to shipping affect exports of grain and other goods, port operations, freight rates and insurance. War risks increase transport costs and force shipowners to seek alternative routes. We have no grounds to claim that any particular company is deliberately creating danger for profit: to establish that, we would need to demonstrate what it did and what it gained, not merely point to rising insurance premiums.
But the underlying logic is clear. Transport is part of the process through which value is realised, and a commodity that cannot reach the market is worthless. Disruption to shipping reverberates through production, trade and the entire international division of labour.
Let us also dispel a misconception that has become popular in recent days. An attack on merchant vessels near NATO countries’ borders does not automatically trigger the application of Article 5. The North Atlantic Treaty requires each ally to take whatever action it considers necessary, including the use of armed force. What is deemed necessary depends on the circumstances and political will, not on a clause in a treaty. Anyone counting on “automatic” protection is relying on something the treaty does not promise.
The Worker in Someone Else’s Economy
Let us turn from ships and substations to the people whose labour underpins everything else. Modern capital increasingly prefers to organise labour through digital platforms. A courier receives orders through an app; a taxi driver depends on an algorithm that assigns rides; a warehouse worker relies on inventory and routing systems. These forms of employment do not abolish labour’s material dependence; they merely conceal it.
A platform requires electricity, communications, data centres, payment systems, roads and warehouses. A courier cannot deliver an order without a connection and a passable road. A driver depends on a vehicle, fuel, repairs and access to customers. The app may work perfectly, yet the worker may earn nothing.
Here, capital demonstrates its skill at shifting costs onto others. The platform distributes orders, sets the conditions for access, calculates payments, manages ratings and blocks accounts. The formally “independent” contractor has little control over working conditions. Meanwhile, the worker pays for transport, fuel, repairs, communications and equipment, and bears the cost of waiting for orders. Payment for an individual order is not the same as income: to understand the worker’s actual situation, one must deduct expenses, depreciation, unpaid time and the losses caused by an irregular flow of orders.
This is how the system is organised: the overall process is coordinated from above, while risks and costs are pushed downwards.
The class dimension is clear. Workers become hostages to infrastructure not because it all belongs to a single owner, but because access to it is controlled by many different parties. The road may belong to the state, the communications network to a private company, the platform to a corporation and the car to the driver. Yet labour depends on the functioning of the entire system. If one link breaks, the worker loses income even though their ability and willingness to work remain intact.
War, sanctions and power cuts make this dependence painfully visible. Communications are cut, fuel prices rise, roads are destroyed, and work comes to a halt even when the workplace, formally speaking, remains intact. The consequences of war therefore extend far beyond the defence industry.
There is also a parallel here that bourgeois analysis tends to overlook. The platform ties a person to someone else’s infrastructure; an army contract ties them to someone else’s risk. In both cases, the person receives money for accepting costs and dangers whose terms they do not determine. The difference in status – wage worker, self-employed person or small proprietor – is real and calls for detailed analysis. But we must not let formal labels obscure the actual dependence on the client, the platform and the means of labour.
Infrastructure serves social needs and capitalist accumulation at the same time. The class question is this: who sets the terms of access to it, who pays when it fails, and who appropriates the results of collective labour? This is one expression of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction: production is social in character, while control over its conditions remains private.
Ukraine: Between Suppliers and Buyers
What can we say about Ukraine? It can be regarded neither as a fully independent actor in these events nor as a mere puppet. The Ukrainian state has its own institutions, ruling groups, military objectives and calculations. But the events of 19–20 October showed just how heavily its ability to wage war depends on its suppliers. Restrictions on Starlink, interruptions to missile-warning services and delays in interceptor deliveries are all levers in the bargaining over which parts of its territory Kyiv should give up.
The “security guarantees” and “post-war reconstruction” being discussed in Oslo hinge on a fundamental question: whose capital will gain access to reconstruction, and on what terms? The documents do not yet exist. Each specific provision will have to be examined by a modern-day Sailor Markin once the documents surface and become available to the proletariat, that is, after the world October. But the general direction is already apparent: when the war ends, someone will find a highly profitable business in reconstruction.
The interests of states do not coincide with the interests of society. Ukrainian workers pay for the war through mobilisation, destroyed homes and infrastructure, lost income and forced displacement. Russian workers pay through inflation, regional debt, risky recruitment and cuts to other budget items. The fact that some consequences are shared does not erase the differences between the sides: responsibility for starting the war and the circumstances of particular military operations remain what they are.
Yet in Kyiv, Moscow and Washington, the parties are bargaining over the price and terms of partition, while wage workers have no seat at the table. Their assigned role is to pay and to die.
What Follows From This?
The diplomatic spectacle displays the political will of states. But that will has run up against their material dependence on the very connections they are trying to reshape: trade flows, energy supplies, insurance policies and transport hubs.
A “New Yalta”, if it takes place at all, will be no better for workers than the old one. It is dangerous not at all as a collusion among the great powers, but as a reminder: every “peaceful settlement” between imperialist states remains a deal to redivide the world, and those excluded from the negotiations – wage workers – will be left to foot the bill. Lenin once described peace agreements between imperialists as “breathing spells” between wars. The current round of negotiations gives us no reason to revise that assessment.
But exposing the gap between governments’ words and deeds, as any conscientious liberal newspaper might do, is not enough for the working class. We must understand how sanctions, war, logistical disruptions, debt burdens and new forms of employment affect workers’ ability to live, resist and act collectively.
Class autonomy requires organisation and a political programme. The party does not replace the independent activity of the class; it gives expression to the class’s political independence. Its task is not to choose the more acceptable national capital, but to oppose the subordination of workers to the interests of their own bourgeoisie. Defending national competitiveness and military advantages is not the same as defending our proletarian interests. Workers do not determine sanctions policy or control military budgets, yet they are the ones who pay for them.
Behind the diplomatic stage set, a struggle is under way over the material conditions of social reproduction. Those conditions are created by collective labour, and workers should not remain hostages to competition between capitals and states. They should not – yet they are. It is time to ask why.
Because a hostage who does not know they are a hostage will not demand to be freed. Because a spectator who mistakes the play for reality never steps onto the stage. And because a class without its own party will always end up bearing the costs of others’ actions.
The conclusion is simple: until the scenery is torn down and a world communist party is built, the bargaining will continue without the participation of those who pay for it.
20 October 2026