“The longer the war goes on, the less people sympathize with Russia in Ukraine. Those who used to speak Russian in everyday life are switching to Ukrainian,” a longtime observer of Ukraine politics, Yevgeny Kisilyev, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “Even the most openly pro-Russian politicians, including the mayor of Odessa … have turned into passionate enemies of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s regime”. Odessa, with its vast grain storage and shipping resources, is a coveted target for Moscow. Russian missiles have been destroying the city since the first days of the war. In March and April, rockets killed dozens of civilians, including a three-month-old girl, Kira Glodan, her mother and grandmother. The tragedy enraged Odessa but the carnage did not stop. On July 1, one of the rockets hit an apartment building in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, killing 19 people. Weeks later, on July 20, “Russia launched eight missiles that cost millions of dollars, which were shot down by our forces along with a Russian drone,” Natalya Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Southern Defense Forces, told The Daily Beast in an interview on last week. Relentless attacks by Russia have hardened local anti-Putin sentiment. “During the first week of the war, Odessa Mayor Gennady Trukhanov — who many believed had a Russian passport — said nothing against Moscow,” local activist Julia Grodetskaya told the Daily Beast. “Thus the concerned citizens assembled and the patriotic volunteers worked hard for the defense of the city. Their actions, and continued Russian violence, changed the leadership and made the local authorities more patriotic,” he said, adding that now, “all former pro-Russian Odyssians are ready to defend our city.” Moscow had not planned it this way. On the eve of the war, one of the Kremlin’s ideologues, Sergei Markov, told the Daily Beast that Russian forces would easily capture Odessa. “There will be a rapid landing of marines supported by a pro-Russian submarine,” Markov predicted of the development of the war in the Black Sea. After a rocket attack on a warehouse of an industrial and commercial company in Odessa on July 16.
Oleksandr Gimanov/AFP via Getty
Instead, Odessa became a symbol of resistance – and this pro-Russian underground melted away. As thousands of evacuees from neighboring Mykolaiv and Russian-held Kherson have flocked to the city, locals have hung huge, patriotic banners with warning messages about potential saboteurs and spies. One of them showed a Ukrainian slitting the throat of a spy: “Get ready, we know all your routes.” More banners in the area of Pushkinska and Bunin Streets read: “If anyone touches Mama Odessa, Mama will bury him.” Odessa also took the decision to get rid of all street names of the “aggressor country” – although it rejected a petition, signed by 25,000 people, calling on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to demolish local monuments to Catherine the Great and Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. . The city said it was not the right time to discuss the pre-revolutionary monuments. But the city’s mayor, Trukhanov, said it was cynical of Moscow to describe Ukraine as a “brotherly people” but destroy it with missiles. “Odessa has suffered losses in this war and we want nothing to do with a state that is trying to wipe our city, our country off the face of the earth,” the mayor said in a public statement last month. Now, even as Russia continues to bomb Odessa, there are signs of vibrant life everywhere. In the harbor, yachts sway gently in the afternoon sun—though everything stays docked this time of year because the Russians have planted mines in the surrounding waters. Still, the Yacht Club marina is bustling: on a recent Friday, musicians from the local opera and philharmonic theater performed a concert of Ukrainian songs for an audience of famous artists, writers and successful businessmen, who in the early days of the war founded two powerful volunteer movements— named On the Wave and Sandbox—to save their beautiful, cute town. They surrounded cultural monuments with sandbags, distributed bulletproof vests and welded tank dams. Ukraine is preparing to send 16 ships full of grain to the Turkish port of Izmir, ending a long financial drought for the city. Odessans watched the smooth and bare Black Sea on Sunday. The first grain ship is scheduled to depart on Monday, but many fear Russia may strike the ships despite Moscow’s agreements with Turkey. “Our beloved sea is like a battlefield,” Dmytro Botchevsky, a retired sea captain, told The Daily Beast. “Our military drone attacked the Russian fleet headquarters in Sevastopol today, there are concerns about the security of the grain passage, of course.” Local defense volunteers — led by Yacht Club director Albert Kobakov — grew larger as the war continued. Hundreds of activists participated. “When the war started, I came here to show that I’m not going to surrender,” said local activist Maya Dimerelli. She and Grodetskaya said the biggest worry in the first week of the war was that the city authorities would betray Odessa and hand it over to Russia. The aftermath of a rocket attack in the village of Serhiivka, Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi region, Odesa region, Ukraine on July 1.
State Emergency Services of Ukraine via Reuters
On the contrary, the businessmen of Odessa felt bound to help their city. From the owner of a perfume shop, Dmitry Malyutin, to the founder of a tourism company, the historian Aleksandr Babich, the city’s elite opened their doors and supported the volunteers. “If not for our society, I’m not sure how long our resistance would have lasted. Their self-organization is fascinating, and time is against Putin — he is violently bombing Mykolayiv, but Odessa is his problem,” Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief of Ukrainskaya Pravda, Ukraine’s legendary newspaper, told The Daily Beast. “Politically we are winning the war – the whole world supports Ukraine.” Thousands of volunteers also signed up as soldiers in the territorial defense units, since Odessa was well aware of the threat of a possible ambush by Russian forces from Transnistria on the one hand and the advancing Russian army on the other. Captain Humeniuk, an officer of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine and the voice of the command of the defense forces in the southern region of Ukraine, told The Daily Beast that the city needed enough volunteers to fill a brigade — and instead had enough to fill three . So, for now, Odessa lives in a state of cautious hope. The head of operations in the south, Lt. Gen. Andriy Kovalchuk, has served in peacekeeping missions in Liberia and the former Yugoslavia. Now Kovalchuk and other military authorities guard the city carefully, explaining to its residents why the beaches have been mined and closed, and giving updates on the war twice a day. The city’s restaurants and cafe terraces are full of people, and although air raid sirens wail several times a day, every day, a visitor can hear a band singing Ukrainian songs on the main Deribasovskaya Avenue and jazz music playing on the garden of The Tolstoy family home. “We will win this battle, just like we did World War II,” vows a Russian-speaking theater director named Anna, whose Jewish family lived through the Nazi invasion. Before this war, she liked to say that she had a “Russian soul.” But now he says: “Odessa, the first Hero City of the USSR, will win this battle too” — but this time, against Moscow.
