Odessa may have experienced gales in recent days, but the skies remain cloudy. Black smoke, that of the fuel tanks hit during the bombardment of the port by Russian shells. Black with torment also for the Odessites who anxiously await the great battle, after a first attempt at landing by the Russian army.
The mythical city, the cosmopolitan city which has welcomed dozens of communities for centuries, Greeks, Italians, Poles, Tatars and Jews, holds its breath. However, an incredible determination deaf from the streets, in front of the barricades, in the shelters, in front of the hastily welded portcullises, the “Czech hedgehogs”, low concrete walls and steel beams which serve as anti-tank defenses. A vigil of arms west of the martyr cities of Kherson and Mariupol.
Daggers and Kalashnikovs
Alexander Domanov, who is patrolling that evening, knows the neighborhoods like the back of his hand. By day, he is an innkeeper, guitar in hand, at the head of a famous underground café, the Michka Yapontchik, named after a local Robin Hood, which serves traditional dishes and Jewish cuisine at the middle of a shambles of objects tracing the history of Odessa since its foundation at the end of the 18th century – old banknotes, Russian loans, map of the city in French sketched at the time of the Duke of Richelieu, the governor of the city. At night, the sturdy Alexander joins a team of Home Defense volunteers who hunt down looters, arrest spies, and restore order in case of mayhem in a megacity that was long a stronghold of the underworld.
As the curfew approaches, he rushes into a downtown parking lot alongside a hundred others volonteriv to listen to the orders of the day distilled by the chief of police, Vyacheslav Gorintsev. The faces are tense, the gestures determined. “Prepare for the worst, anything can happen in this city!” Says the master of ceremonies. The men carry Kalashnikovs, daggers, shotguns and machine guns. It’s a strange atmosphere reminiscent of a guerrilla war, an intention of urban guerrilla warfare where one is ready to fight district by district, street by street.
Before breaking ranks, the militia restaurateur listens to one last piece of advice: “Unplug the adrenaline and get your head going!” Then he rushes into the night, not far from the port, desperately silent, the one that Isaac Babel told in his Stories from Odessa. Tonight, the Territorial Defense volunteer is looking for the diversity, spies in the pay of Russia.
Alexander Domanov on patrol
Alexandre Gerfaut
night spies
According to him, there are many conspirators in Odessa, where even the sandy beaches have been mined. If the Mediterranean-looking city has been targeted by Russian artillery three nights in a row this week, it is because of the traitors, some of whom have rented an apartment for months, and many of whom are well paid.
The patrols have thus just arrested several men, suspected of having sent the coordinates of strategic places to the Russian intelligence services. “Again this morning, we neutralized an informant, breathes Alexander Domanov, and the other day two guards in a car with false plates near a strategic bridge. We understood that Odessa was one of Putin’s main targets because of our port, but also our culture of openness, contrary to his.” A duly prepared infiltration plan, according to the military prefect of Uman, north of Odessa, Igor Myklashchuk. “The bigger a city, the more spies can get involved, confides this 39-year-old political science researcher who suddenly became a warrior hierarch. We fear these saboteurs. Fortunately, our intelligence service, the SBU, is effective.
One year of grain stocks
In Odessa, everyone knows that the city represents the lung of the country: 80% of Ukraine’s grain is exported through its docks, with cranes now immobile. This disturbs Nikolai Vikmyansky, a figure of the great port and businessman in import-export. “Do you see the horizon of the Black Sea? Everything is blocked by Russian frigates, launches this specialist in food distribution, in a leather biker jacket and with a weathered face. sell our crops. The peasants have already started planting again, on the orders of the government. We will be moving towards self-sufficiency, and we have stocks for a year. The problem will be rising prices around the worldwith the wheat that feeds Africa and the Middle East.”
A judgment confirmed by Valéry Zakharchuk, the director of Urkland, an agricultural company with grain silos which has the second largest agricultural area in the country, a veritable breadbasket. “In my silos I store up to 130,000 tons, but the grain can no longer be shipped abroad.” A former Soviet army officer, he believes that the Russian military suffered huge losses, due to the lack of preparation but also to logistical shortcomings, not to mention the combativeness of the Ukrainian forces.
“Putin wants to starve us by blocking access to the Black Sea, but that only brings us closer to Europe through road networks.” The former Red Army recalls, ironically, that the harvests of the previous year had recorded a national record, ie 106 million tonnes.
Rehearsal at the opera
The priest Alexander Smerechynsky also remains at the quay. Military chaplain of the Ukrainian navy, he continues to “save the souls” of sailors. He says that a Ukrainian frigate was sunk and that another ship was scuttled to avoid falling into Russian hands. “Before the war, this city was divided between Russian speakers and those who speak Ukrainian, says the monk in military fatigues and a Christian face, long hair on a short beard. Now, everyone or almost everyone supports the cause of freedom and independence. That, too, is Putin’s mistake.”
Alexander Smerechynsky, military chaplain in Odessa.
Alexandre Gerfaut
On the ground floor of an old building from the time of the tsars, women are busy weaving large camouflage nets, others are filling rations for those going to the front, in the direction of Mykolaiv, on the outskirts defended by special forces. In Odessa as elsewhere, the back will hold. On the empty stage of the Baroque-style Opera House built in 1887 and protected by sandbags, a stone’s throw from the famous Potemkin staircase with 192 steps and the statue of the Duke of Richelieu, the deputy director talks about the next performances, with its hundred musicians and as many dancers, most of whom serve in territorial defense or join mutual aid associations when they are not rehearsing the next opera, Ekaterina.
“It’s our way of participating in the war effort, says Sergei Mulberg, himself a clarinettist. My staff will play in the streets and on the beaches. It restores morale to the population, if necessary.” In the neighboring street, a trumpet player echoes his words of hope. “Never have I seen a people resisting with so much energy and mobilizing so collectively for their freedoms”, comments Jean-Christian Kipp, of the Odysseus Foundation, in Ukraine for a mission on human rights.
“We will resist until the end,” said historian Andrei Krasnozhon, rector of the University of Odessa. From his small fisherman’s house, the university tells the story of the city, its unique spirit, its sense of ingenuity. It was from his shack that he heard missiles falling on the port. The other day he filmed two Russian frigates coming from Crimea, theAdmiral Makarov and theAdmiral Essen, bombarding the coast from offshore.
When asked if he is worried about a new landing attempt, the city historian, author of a novel, Kotly, about the partisans fighting in the catacombs in 1941 against the Nazis, replies mischievously: “Not in the least. During the cannonade, my wife Elena was in the kitchen with our 5-year-old son and calmly asked me to count the points sighing: ‘Ah, I feel that the Russians are going to lose again…'” Odessa the beautiful has lost none of its legendary humor.