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ODESA, Ukraine (Russia has been bombing the coastal city of Odessa since the early days of its war in Ukraine; however, the important grain port has a symbol of ongoing local resistance, where even former pro-Russian stalwarts are now embracing Ukrainian patriotism.
“The longer the war lasts, the less other people sympathize with Russia in Ukraine. Those who spoke Russian in everyday life, they transfer to Ukrainian,” Ukrainian political observer Yevgeny Kisilyev told The Daily Beast on Tuesday. “Even the top blatantly pro-Russian politicians, adding the mayor of Odessa. . . they have passionate enemies of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s regime. “
Odessa, with its huge grain warehouse and shipping resources, is a highly sought-after target by Moscow. Russian missiles have been destroying the city since the early days of the war. In March and April, the missiles killed dozens of civilians, adding three-month-old girl, Kira Glodan, her mother and grandmother.
The tragedy infuriated Odessa, but the bloodbath stopped. On July 1, one of the missiles hit a building in Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, killing 19 people. A few weeks later, on July 20, “Russia fired 8 missiles that charge millions of dollars, which our forces shot down with a Russian drone,” Natalya Humeniuk, a spokeswoman for the Southern Defense Forces, told The Daily Beast in an interview last week.
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Russia’s relentless attacks have hardened local sentiments opposed to Putin. “During the first week of the war, the mayor of Odessa, Gennady Trukhanov, many of whom thought he had a Russian passport, said nothing against Moscow,” local activist Julia Grodetskaya told the Daily. Beast. ” The concerned citizens were consolidated and the patriotic volunteers worked hard for the defense of the city. Their movements and constant Russian violence have replaced the leadership and made the local government more patriotic,” he said, adding that now “all former pro-Russian Odessians are in a position to protect our city. “
On the eve of the war, one of the Kremlin’s ideologues, Sergei Markov, told the Daily Beast that Russian forces would take Odessa without problems. the progression of the war in the Black Sea.
After a missile attack on a warehouse of an advertising and advertising company in Odessa on July 16.
Instead, Odessa has become a symbol of resistance, and this pro-Russian subsoil collapsed. As thousands of displaced people from neighboring Russian-occupied Mykolaiv and Kherson flocked to the city, citizens hung huge patriotic banners with messages of caution for potential saboteurs and spies. One of them showed a Ukrainian slitting a spy’s throat: “Get ready, we all know your routes. “
Odessa also made the resolution to get rid of all street names of the “aggressor country,” though he 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 talk about pre-revolutionary monuments. However, the city’s mayor, Trukhanov, said it was cynical for Moscow to call Ukraine a “fraternal people” and destroy it with missiles. “Odessa has suffered losses in this war and we have nothing to do with a state that is looking to remove our people, our country from the face of the earth,” the mayor said at a public hearing last month.
Now, even as Russia continues to bomb Odessa, there are symptoms of colorful life everywhere. In the harbor, yachts sway gently under the overdue afternoon sun, all staying on the docks this season, as the Russians have planted mines in the surrounding waters. However, the yacht club’s marina is bustling with activity: on a recent Friday, musicians from the local opera and philharmonic theatre offered a concert of Ukrainian songs to an audience of prominent artists, writers and businessmen who, at the beginning of the war, founded two hard volunteer movements, called On the Wave and Sandbox, to save your beautiful and elegant city. They surrounded cultural monuments with sandbags, distributed armored vests and welded anti-tank barriers.
Ukraine is preparing to send 16 shipments full of grain to the Turkish port of Izmir, ending a long economic drought for the city. Odessens watching the Black Sea smooth and naked on Sunday. The first shipment with grain will depart on Monday, but many worry that Russia will arrive at shipments despite Moscow’s agreements with Turkey. “Our favorite sea is like a battlefield,” Dmitro Botskevsky, a retired skipper, told The Daily Beast. “Our army drone attacked the headquarters of the Russian fleet today in Sevastopol, of course, there are considerations about the protection of the passage for grain. “
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Local defense volunteers, led by yacht club director Albert Kobakov, have grown larger as the war progressed. Hundreds of activists joined. ” When the war started, I came here to show that I would not give up,” the local activist said. She and Grodetskaya said the biggest fear of the first week of the war was that the city government would betray Odessa and hand it over to Russia.
The aftermath of a missile attack on the village of Serhiivka, Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi district, Odessa of Ukraine, on July 1.
Instead, Odessa’s entrepreneurs felt determined to help their city. From the owner of a perfumery, Dmitry Malyutin, to the founder of a tourism company, the historian Aleksandr Babich, the city’s elite opened their doors and supported the volunteers. Society, I don’t know how long our resistance would have lasted. His self-organization is desirable and the time is on The Job: he is bombing Mykolaiv violently, but Odessa is his problem,” Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief of Ukrainskaya Pravda, the mythical Ukrainian newspaper, told the Daily Beast. “Politically, we are winning the war: everyone supports Ukraine. “
Thousands of volunteers also signed up as infantrymen in territorial defense units, as Odessa was well aware of the risk of a possible ambush through Russian forces in 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 administration 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 Commander-in-Chief of Operations in the South, Major General Andriy Kovalchuk, has served in peacekeeping missions in Liberia and the former Yugoslavia. Now, Kovalchuk and other army governments monitor the city carefully, explaining to its citizens why the beaches were mined and closed, and providing updates on the war twice a day. Restaurants and the terraces of the city’s cafes are crowded, and sirens from airstrikes scream several times a day. , every day a guest can listen to an organization that makes a song Ukrainian songs in the central Deribasovskaya Avenue, and jazz music games on the lawn of the Tolstoy Family House.
“We will win this battle, as we won World War II,” swears a Russian-speaking director named Anna, whose circle of Jewish relatives suffered the Nazi invasion. Before that war, he liked to say that he had a “Russian soul. “”But now she says: ‘Odessa, the first heroic city of the USSR, will also win this battle,’ but this time, opposite to Moscow.
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