The Long War #4
ODESA—It is hard to imagine a sharper, more brutal contrast than between wartime Odesa and, two hours by car eastward, Mykolaiv. Even in the best of times, they felt completely different. One a joyful city firmly grounded in its Russian empire origins and the myths—multicultural Odesa, Jewish Odesa, gangster Odesa, refined Odesa—it carefully built about itself, the other an industrial, serious city of shipbuilders that churned out submarines, battlecruisers and aircraft carriers until the fall of the Soviet Union and the slow spiral of perpetual decline that followed it.
These days, the contrast is elsewhere of course. Mykolaiv has all the marks of a frontline city, bombed in the late evening and early morning, distracted by the sound of outgoing artillery during the day. The shelling brutally intensified these past few weeks, as both Russian and Ukrainian troops seemed to gear up for an offensive. It intensified so much that a farmer who fled to Mykolaiv back in March admitted to me he felt the city was currently more dangerous than his own village, just 10 kilometers from the frontline. “Maybe it’ll be the opposite tomorrow” he shrugged.
The city isn’t empty, but it is tense. Heavy checkpoints guard the bridge that marks the entrance of the city—a little bit upstream, near the bank, one can see the concrete building of the regional administration, ripped almost in half by a Russian strike back in March. The city isn’t devastated, with the destruction feeling more random than anything else. A supermarket here, a hotel there, a university over there. Men can sometimes be seen digging through the rubble. Long queues regularly appear at water distribution points set up throughout the city, while local authorities often announce repair work that will cut off the water—which isn’t drinkable anyway—in some neighborhoods. “A nightmare” said an old man, while struggling to push a shopping cart full of bottles he had just filled with water at a local distribution point. “This shelling… it’s like Russian roulette, you never know where it’s going to fall.”
Odessa… isn’t like that. Obviously, the city wasn’t hit anywhere as hard as Mykolaiv. But it’s more than that. Odessa feels disconnected. Unconcerned, even. The hotels are empty, the tourists didn’t come and many shops have closed. Yet, Odessa largely remains its usual self. Locals go out, bars and restaurants remain busy during the weekend. The parking spaces of the city’s historical center are still littered with expensive Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches. Air sirens yell, and are ignored. It’s not that the war isn’t there—how could it not be? Tens of thousands have left, many more lost their jobs, and only 33 schools throughout the entire city will open their doors come September. But it does feel a lot further away than it actually is, even in the conversations. One parent put it this way: “the kids were scared at first, but they got used to it and overall, nothing has changed”. It is hard to describe. But it is strange.
Something to read
🏭 (Civic Monitoring) Developments in eastern Ukraine: 24 June – 2 August 2022 (Analyst and journalist Nikolaus von Twickel has been following developments in the parts of Eastern Ukraine held by Russian proxy groups for years now. His monitoring work is all the more important now, as Russia gears up for a possible annexation in regions where reliable information is extremely hard to get)
🍾 (1800 / in Ukrainian) How can locals in Cherkasy dispose of Molotov cocktails (Yep, it’s an issue now. Five months in, as the fear of urban battles has receded in cities far from the frontline, people wonder what to do with the thousands of Molotov cocktails frantically made in the first weeks of the Russian invasion. “1800,” a local outlet in the central Ukrainian city of Cherkasy, gives a few pointers)
🚫 (Associated Press) Ukrainian resistance grows in Russian-occupied areas (we probably won’t know what is really going on in those regions for some time, but this is one of the best works on the topic of the Ukrainian resistance in southern Ukraine I’ve come accross).
👨✈️ (Journal of Democracy) How Zelensky Has Changed Ukraine
Something else worth checking out
There is a general impression among journalists and, well, anyone paying attention to Ukraine that interest in the war and Ukraine more generally is waning fast. This graph measuring the percentage of stories featuring the word “Ukraine” in a collection of 87 reputable US media shows attention is almost back at pre-war levels already. It was to be expected of course, but I’ll admit I would not have expected it to happen so quickly.