In Odesa

About twenty minutes’ walk from Odesa’s main railway station, down the city’s wide avenues lined with plane trees, you reach one of the hubs of the Ukrainian Côte d’Azur. Sports cars and SUVs rumble past the terraces of cocktail bars and Italian restaurants, interspersed with sex shops and strip joints, which thin out as you get nearer the opera house and the neo-classical town hall. My hosts steered me instead to a vegan café in a quieter street, where I eavesdropped on a group of young entrepreneurs in beanies and bermuda denims, brainstorming in a mix of Ukrainian, Russian and English.

Odesa is mostly Russian-speaking and sometimes thought to be more pro-Russian than other parts of Ukraine, but there isn’t a straightforward link between language and loyalty. When I raised the question of a potential backlash against Ukrainisation in Odesa, a Belgian diplomat was reminded of the way the French talk about Belgium. ‘There is something about multilingual countries that eludes the imperial mindset,’ he said, ‘French, British or Russian.’

At Easter I shared a meal with a group of other aid workers. Some had been displaced from Kherson, others from the Donbas. They chatted in Russian but the toast to victory was proposed in Ukrainian. At a recent meeting, when a Russophone project manager struggled with the technical points in her pitch, she was encouraged by the director to switch to Russian. A local photographer and tour guide, who refuses to speak the ‘language of the enemy’, especially to foreigners, is quite happy to talk with someone who understands Ukrainian but answers in Russian or Surzhyk (a hybrid of the two languages, which varies from city to city).

Not everyone is so tolerant. Odesa was once known for its flourishing Russian chanson scene; a few street artists on the Potemkin Steps keep the tradition going, but in April, when two 18-year-old performers departed from their repertoire of songs in English and Ukrainian to knock out a piece in Russian, they were interrupted by police, who asked to check their IDs although they were not breaking any law. In schools, the transition to a fully Ukrainian-language education system is a serious challenge (as it is in other former Soviet republics moving away from Russian-language education).

Odesa has been spared the brunt of the war. The sparse anti-tank obstacles and pillboxes at intersections are like neglected street furniture; armed police and soldiers look more relaxed than their counterparts in Paris. Most of the time there is no direct threat to the city centre. The performers on the Potemkin Steps barely pause when the air raid sirens sound, though they’re close to the port, which has often been targeted. A quick glance at a Telegram channel tells you if today’s rockets, drones or missiles are headed in your direction. The city’s array of anti-aircraft cannon, mobile heavy machine-guns and missiles offer up a stiff if noisy resistance.

Anything longer than 24 hours without an air raid warning is cause for anxiety. Russian attacks are generally more intense after a pause, as in Kyiv on 23 April, following Putin’s 48-hour Easter truce. In Odesa last week, two days of calm were followed by the biggest attack in months. The night sky was active as half a dozen Shahed drones slipped past the outer defences. Some were shot down, but at least two civilians were killed. Military deaths are rarely reported and hits on sensitive infrastructure filter slowly into the news cycle.

Putin’s unilaterally declared ceasefire from 8 to 10 May, covering Russia’s Victory Day Parade on the 9th, was met with widespread scepticism and rejected by Kyiv. A few hours before it was due to come into force, Ukraine launched one of the largest drones attacks of the war, stranding sixty thousand air passengers across Russia and disrupting the arrival of guests attending the parade. In Odesa, an uneasy feeling has set in again. During the truce, Russian reconnaissance drones flew several sorties. Most people see the Russian ceasefires as a PR stunt. Zelensky, by asking for a thirty-day ceasefire and quickly accepting Putin’s suggestion of an in-person meeting, perhaps in Istanbul on 15 May, has been trying to call Russia’s bluff.

Another pervasive worry is forced recruitment by Ukraine’s conscription squads. Groups of four to six soldiers and police officers grab men of serving age off the streets. Lioura is a carpenter in an art collective in the centre of town. At 61, he’s too old for the army, but his collective has lost half its members to the armed forces. He shared his dismay at seeing his friends go off to get killed by a ‘rifleman with shit for brains and a month’s worth of basic training’.

Vala, a dedicated supporter of the Ukrainian military and an active member of the volunteer network in Odesa, likens the policy to the forced enlistment of Ukrainians in the Red Army in 1941. The lack of available manpower means that many soldiers who’ve been fighting since 2022 cannot be demobilised. The return of a million or more veterans – some embittered, many traumatised – is one of the challenges facing national and local government once the war freezes or comes to an end.

The mayor of Odesa, Gennadiy Trukhanov, has been in office since 2014. He is not popular with the post-Maidan generation. Accused of restyling himself as a Ukrainian patriot only once the Russians withdrew from Kyiv in March 2022, Trukhanov, who faced arrest for embezzlement in 2023, is also rumoured to hold a Russian passport and is often held responsible for the dilapidated state of Odessa’s 19th-century buildings. Money has been routed into the construction of monstrous hotel complexes along the coast. In the words of a recent report, ‘obtaining construction permits is virtually impossible in Odesa without resorting to bribery’.

He has spoken out against some aspects of Ukrainisation, notably the removal of statues of Pushkin, Isaac Babel and the Soviet marshal Rodion Malinovsky, mandated by a law passed in spring 2023. Two years later, they are still standing: Malinovsky’s bust regularly has the word ‘occupier’ sprayed on it (it’s soon cleaned). Most citizens can live without statues of Malinovsky or Catherine the Great. But Babel, the author of Odesa Tales, who immortalised the gangsters of the seaport and the Jewish quarter of Moldavanka? Even the most stoical members of the city’s Russian-speaking intelligentsia twitch at the idea.