Anna Husalska is a journalist and political analyst.
ODESSA, Ukraine — March 15 was a normal Friday with light rain. At 10 a.m., Odesite's friends were busy with their usual routines when a “double tap” attack from a Russian Iskander-M missile fired from Crimea hit the southern district of Dacha Kovalevskovo. Artist Misha Reva was working on a painting. A sculpture in his studio. Furniture producer Nika Vichniansky was returning from a business trip to Kiev. Historian Sasha Babich was mailing a package. At his home in Soborna Square, I was engrossed in internet shopping.
Misha, Sasha, and I all heard two explosions. Although it was 11 miles away, Iskander was huge, making a very loud hissing sound and leaving a huge crater behind. It is not the well-known puff-puff-puff of Shahed drones, which defense systems can shoot down quite effectively. We quickly confirmed the approximate location of the impact on our Telegram channel and quickly learned that the entire group was safe.
However, a massacre was taking place at the scene. Some people died from the initial impact, while others who rushed to help were hit by a second missile that landed in almost the same spot just 12 minutes later. The death toll was 21 and the number of injured was 75. The victims included an emergency medical technician, two firefighters, and several police officers. I saw a photo of a dead body under a silver foil blanket. Fluorescent red pants and a jacket with reflective stripes identified this person as a Samaritan, a civilian rescuer who paid with his life.
President Vladimir Putin launched his attack on the first day of Russia's farcically misnamed presidential “election.” Maybe it wasn't meant to be symbolic. Perhaps it was just “one more time.” This attack was his third major attack on Odessa in two weeks. On March 2, 12 people, including five children, were killed by a Shahid drone in the northern district of Peresip. Today, the apartment building looks like a dollhouse. Part of the building has been removed, revealing the inside of the apartment complex. Four days later, seven people were killed by a missile fired from occupied Crimea at a port about 300 meters from where President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and visiting Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis boarded a car.
What does “normal” mean in Odessa now? The day before this attack, I attended a meeting. It was held in the basement of a hotel. It's not because people are afraid. Even when an air raid siren sounds, very few people rush to evacuation centers. But alarms cause confusion. Underground meetings are likely to continue no matter what the Russians do.
Later that night, over drinks and dinner at a friend's house, we were reminded of the war again. We had to finish because the city, like the rest of Ukraine, is under curfew.
People here are trying to live a normal life, but it's an imitation of normalcy. Let's use my friends as an example. For the past two years, Misha has been making sculptures from the debris of war. It conveys the horrors of war, like Pablo Picasso's “Guernica.” Nika will go to Kiev to help procure both drones and anti-drone weapons, which are very important for Odessa's defense. Sasha is sending first aid kits to the troops in Kherson, something that every soldier needs, but very often not provided by the Ministry of Defense. I had ordered three excavators online from a Polish company to use for digging trenches. The funds were raised through a recently launched crowdsourcing campaign.
Odessa is everything Putin hates: modern, cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and multiethnic. He claims it's a “Russian town” but sends missiles to destroy it. The population is used to war, but it is also defiant, almost provocative. Trying to live a rich cultural life is a way of resisting what Ukrainians call “Russism”, the Russian version of fascism. This month, the opera house here will perform Georges Bizet's “Carmen,'' Maurice Ravel's “Bolero,'' and Carl Orff's “Carmina Burana.'' The museum is hosting the 2023 World Press Photo Exhibition, and this year's photo is of a pregnant woman on a watermelon-colored stretcher in Mariupol. The musical theater staged a production of “Fiddler on the Roof,'' sung in Russian with Ukrainian subtitles.
But there are limits to rebellion and art. As attacks occur more and more regularly, a new sharpness is emerging among people. You can see it on the faces of our Odesite friends as they check their phones for news about the war. They remain convinced that, against all hopes, Ukraine will win. But with Western partners in turmoil and Ukraine lacking enough troops to fight, Putin's impunity weighs heavily on the city.
