“There is a city by the sea that I see in my dreams. Oh, if you only knew how dear this city is to me…” With the melody of this almost hundred-year-old song, which celebrates the beauty of the southern Ukrainian city of Odessa, especially in spring, all travelers are welcomed or farewelled over loudspeakers at Odessa’s main train station.
One can only dream of spring in Odessa at the moment. With temperatures often ten degrees below zero, the city seems to stand still. “Now even the sea doesn’t protect us anymore from the cold,“complains a saleswoman.
“So you want to go to European Street,” the taxi driver assures himself. “Do you know what this street used to be called? It was called Katerininskaya. These fanatics have nothing better to do than change street names.” Now, after more than 40 years of service as a local taxi driver, he still has to learn new street names by heart.
In general, this is a war of capital. “You can make a lot of money with war,” he explains. “And that’s why this war won’t end so quickly. But that’s exactly what he wants: “For this war to end as quickly as possible.”
Largely disempowered
A meeting in the “Athens” shopping center on the first basement floor is bomb-proof. In a café, Vyacheslav Azarov sips a hot drink. The blogger, anarchist and editor of a forthcoming book about the persecution of leftists in the Soviet Union is not surprised by the taxi driver’s comments.
Although these are interesting, they do not contribute to the formation of opinions or move anything else. “At the moment there are only two actors making politics in Ukraine: the presidential administration and the nationalists.” All other forces are largely disempowered.
Journalists sit in front of their laptops in rooms on Kanatska Street. Alexander Sibircew also works here today. The journalist from the local news portal “Dumskaya” – known in the city for his research into organized crime – seems to be under a lot of time pressure. He pounds on his keyboard non-stop.
“You can’t trust an insane serial killer.” It is clear who he means: Russian President Vladimir Putin. The war will only end when Putin is no longer alive. “The war is taking place on Ukrainian territory. Russia is the aggressor. We are defending ourselves. Suppose you are attacked on the street, then don’t call for negotiations,” he says.
That night another resident of Odessa died not far from the train station in a Russian air raid. He doesn’t believe that Russia will ever succeed in taking Odessa.
Huge unemployment
“Although many residents of Odessa speak Russian, Odessa is part of Ukraine. We do not want to be part of Russia and never will be. The Russian language is not a monopoly of Russia. We can and will speak many languages, because this is Odessa, this is our history and our background,” says Sibircew.
Lidia also doesn’t believe that the Russians will take Odessa, although for a different reason. The woman, in her mid-50s, made a quick stop at the “Coffee Ocean”. She is proud of her daughter, who is successful in her career despite enormous unemployment.
After completing an English degree and a technical school for administration, she worked as a real estate agent. “She sells an apartment every month.” At prices between $65 and $100,000, it’s certainly not a bad win for a young professional. Most of the apartments sold have a sea view, and the buyers are mainly Ukrainians who live abroad. “This means,” she concludes, “that many Ukrainians believe in a prosperous Ukrainian Odessa.”
However, she is afraid for her son. He is of military age and can be drafted at any time. “They already had him once, but because he’s an unruly guy, a violent confrontation broke out. He managed to slip through the cracks of the military authorities.”
A smile
Compared to other cities, Odessa is still lucky. While the people in the capital Kyiv On average, people only have electricity for four hours every day, in Odessa it is exactly the opposite: here they usually have no electricity for four hours.
But that can vary greatly depending on the neighborhood. While most of the population goes without electricity for about two hours a day, there are some neighborhoods where it goes out for more than twelve hours a day. That is also the case this afternoon. The sound of humming generators can be heard everywhere. Suddenly a smile flashes across Lidia’s face. She has just found out that she has become a grandmother.