Travelling down by bus from Chişinău to Odessa in July 2022, my first visit to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February, I was not sure what to expect. I had been following the news from Ukraine compulsively. I knew there was a night-time curfew, and that there were frequent air raid alerts. I had heard life in Odessa had normalised somewhat since those first fraught weeks when the threat of a Russian assault on the city from the land or the sea had seemed very real. The tank traps on the city streets had largely been removed. But how was life in the city? How were people coping? Having previously lived in Odessa, I had a huge attachment to this beautiful city, with its unique spirit and its frenetic nightlife. A largely Russian-speaking city with a significant pro-Russian element among its population when Russia began its aggression against Ukraine in 2014, Odessa had briefly appeared at risk of going the same way as Donetsk and Luhansk. How had the city fared in face of the new Russian onslaught?
Many of my fellow passengers were women who had sought refuge abroad and were returning for a visit. As men under 60 were mostly not allowed to leave the country, families had been divided, and several of the women said they were returning to visit their husbands. Crossing the border, I confess to feeling quite excited to be returning to the country and the city I loved. The roads near the border were chock-a-block with trucks. A deal had been reached a few days before between Russia, Turkey, the United Nations and Ukraine to enable ships carrying grain to leave Ukraine’s ports. But it hadn’t yet been implemented. In the meantime, as much as possible was being transported out by road.
I had travelled this road so many times before, crossing back briefly into Moldova to skirt the liman, the wide body of water at the Dniester estuary that separated southern Bessarabia from the rest of Ukraine, and then crossing the Dniester bridge at Mayaky. The traffic as we entered Odessa at the “Dva Stolpa” (Two Pillars, the joke being there are three of them) roundabout was as busy as usual, and as we drove into the city my first thought was that everything appeared quite normal. We arrived at the central bus station on a warm sunny evening, and I felt almost elated to be back in Odessa.
A friend had told me that that evening a band I had seen before would be playing at one of the best bars in Odessa. So I had to go. The bar was in the city centre, a good hour-and-a-half walk from my accommodation, but I decided to go on foot. It quickly became clear that my first impressions had been wrong, and that all was very far from normal. The main road into the city may have been busy with traffic, but most of Odessa’s broad boulevards were unnaturally empty. And while the tank traps had gone, there were numerous military checkpoints along the way, with barricades halfway across the road. The soldiers weren’t stopping people, but their presence underlined the uneasy atmosphere in a city which had been hit by missiles, which was not all that far from the frontline, and from which a large part of the population had fled.
The bar was packed, the music frenetic, and the atmosphere frenzied as the revellers danced and yelled their appreciation. It was glorious. The spirit of Odessa unbowed, unbeatable. What a joy. There were people I knew there as well. Next to the band there was a box for donations for the Ukrainian army, which was being filled generously. Between the songs, the singer spoke to the audience in Ukrainian, a significant and meaningful change in Odessa. It seemed extraordinary, almost surreal. My first evening back in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion, and here I was enjoying Odessa’s nightlife, as intense and feverish as ever. Except that it all had to end quite early, in time for the 11pm curfew. I had imagined it would be easy to get back before the curfew. I would take a taxi at 10pm, no problem. Wrong. At 10pm it was completely impossible to find a taxi, and the marshutkas, minibuses that ferried passengers around the city, had all stopped for the night. It was too far to walk home in time. With the help of a friend, I tried to hitch a ride, but without success. By this point I was getting anxious. What would happen if I were caught out after curfew, I wondered? Thankfully my friend was still with me, and at 10.30 she said that I’d just have to stay at her place, which was close-by. What a first evening back in Odessa. A magnificent concert, and then I almost missed the curfew.
Strolling in Odessa the next day, I was still more struck be the contrast between things that appeared quite normal, and the things that were absolutely not normal at all. Many cafes and restaurants had closed, including some of my favourites. While all the supermarkets were working and well stocked, many other shops, clothes shops etc., were closed. City centre shopping malls were eerily quiet. Self-service canteens that were usually bustling at lunchtimes were nearly empty, if they were still open at all, food sitting too long without customers, dried out and unappetising. The emptiness was sad. Yet there were cafes and restaurants working much as normal. One of my favourite places in the garden next to the opera house was open, and I spent a very pleasant lunchtime there, although there were few customers. City centre streets close to the seaside, above the port area, were closed off. Odessa’s most famous landmark, the Potemkin steps, were unreachable. The statue of the Duc de Richelieu, Odessa’s most famous mayor (and governor of Novorossiya province, which encompassed southern Ukraine), which stands at the top of the steps, was covered up for its safety.
By contrast, the nearby statue of Catherine the Great, founder of Odessa, was uncovered, unprotected. The writing was on the wall for the Russian Empress, as the pressure to remove all trace of Russian associations became irresistible. Some Odessans told me they would not like to see the statue removed, that Catherine was part of the city’s history. But times had moved on. The bust of Pushkin that stood at one end of the seaside boulevard, in front of the city council building, would probably also not survive, I thought. The great poet had lived in Odessa for a time, but for many Ukrainians these were no longer associations that they wished to celebrate.
On a warm Sunday afternoon I strolled with a friend along the seafront, as I had so many times before. People ate ice creams. Children ran about playing. We sat and drank iced coffees on a café terrace by the water’s edge. No one was in the sea. There was a risk from mines. But otherwise the impression again was of a striking level of normality. But there were always reminders of how abnormal things were. The closure of so many shops and cafes, the emptiness of the streets was not only because so many people had left Odessa, fled abroad or to safer regions of Ukraine, further from the frontline. It surely also reflected the collapse in economic activity. While some could still afford to eat in nice restaurants, many others had lost their jobs and incomes. We didn’t see them in the city centre because they had no reason to come there, no money to spend. Many were probably eking out a poor existence in modest apartments in the suburbs. How did they manage, I wondered? How did the elderly and vulnerable cope? Ukraine’s social welfare system was limited even in the best of times. No doubt volunteers and NGOs had stepped into the breach to some extent. But was it enough?
In Shevchenko Park, close-by the monument to the unknown sailor, there were plaques commemorating the hero cities of the Soviet Union for their courage in the Second World War. Now those commemorating cities in Russia had been covered over, leaving only the six in Ukraine and Belarus uncovered, including Odessa. But the spellings were in Russian, not Ukrainian. Would these plaques survive the cull of symbols, statues and street names associated with the Soviet Union and Russia? Following the full-scale Russian invasion, President Zelensky had designated several towns and cities as hero cities of Ukraine, marking their courage in standing up to the Russian aggression. It occurred to me that this repetition of a Soviet practice, naming hero cities, was rather odd in a country determined to reject all Soviet associations.
The first time I heard the air raid siren I was walking across Kulykove Pole, a large open square in the city centre. It was loud, a sound that had such associations for someone from London. It was a sound that would have been very familiar to my mother. To think that I was now hearing it in a European city in 2022. I looked around to see how other people reacted, the Odessans who had been living with this for months already. Everyone I saw completely ignored it and just carried on walking, without any change of pace or direction. So I did likewise. Odessa had already been hit a few times by missiles, including the port. But I was told by a local that when the siren sounded, it was not yet clear where the missiles were headed, and that several cities over a wide area southern Ukraine sounded the alarm. They rarely hit Odessa, although on that occasion I was told that a missile impact had been close enough for people in the city to hear it. I did not hear it myself. Missiles had several times hit smaller towns along the coast, perhaps targeting Ukrainian air defence systems, although that was only speculation as, naturally, the Ukrainian authorities did not divulge such information.
My sleep was disturbed by the sirens a few times during my stay in Odessa. I had asked whether people went to a basement in the building where I was staying, for shelter. I was told the advice was to go to a room with no exterior walls or windows, which in my case meant the bathroom. The first time I did just that. But Odessans I spoke to told me almost nobody bothered, so I didn’t either. Such a blasé attitude presumably was not the norm in towns closer to the frontline which had more often been struck by missiles.
I left Ukraine by bus to Bucharest, travelling down through southern Bessarabia. We stopped for a break at the roadside hotel and restaurant in Tartabunary where I had stayed on a number of occasions, and which had been a regular stop-off during journeys in this beautiful region. The first ships filled with grain had left Odessa under the UN-brokered deal while I had been in the city, but the roads were still choked with lorries, backed up for several kilometres as we approached the Romanian border. We crossed the Danube by ferry close to Orlivka, a little town where the head of the village council had talked excitedly about the potential of the this watery paradise for tourism when I had visited a few years earlier. He had told me of his plan to introduce water buffalo, which would control the vegetation in the area’s waterways, as well as producing mozzarella and drawing tourists. He had realised his dream as well, before Russia’s aggression struck.
As I crossed the Danube from Ukraine to Romania, it really struck me. A short river crossing, and on the other side no air raid sirens, no curfew, no roadblocks, no evil bastards wrecking the lives of innocent, peaceful people. Despite the awful circumstances, Odessa retained its wonderful spirit. Its resilience and that of all Ukraine was awe inspiring. I was very glad to have had the chance to be there, and to spend time with wonderful friends. And I was more than ever convinced that Ukraine would prevail.
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