Chris York samples the mood of Ukrainians in the Black Sea city after 200 days of war, and finds conflicting feelings of fear, suspicion, hope, sadness and defiance

Defiance

“You can never kill the Odesans,” declares fifty-five-year-old Yelena, arms aloft as she emerges from a sea full of mines onto a closed beach covered in signs warning of the explosive peril facing those who choose to ignore them.

As the summer draws to a close, the people of Odesa are still testing the boundaries of their new normal, one that is adapting to the realities and restrictions of war but also takes advantage of the freedoms that still remain as a part of Ukraine not under the yoke of Russian occupation.

“I’m Ukrainian, I’m a mother and I want to live my life in my Odesa,” Yelena adds. “Russia will not defeat us.”

Vladimir Putin’s original and failed plan to occupy all of Ukraine envisaged an amphibious assault on Odesa, aimed at capturing a port city with huge strategic significance on the coast of the Black Sea.

Taking the city would not only have provided Russia with a land and naval staging point to achieve the Kremlin’s goal of a land corridor stretching from Russia to Moldova, but it would have landlocked Ukraine, cutting off the ‘Breadbasket of Europe’ from the sea and depriving it of a means to export the millions of tons of grain it produces every year.

Since the reinvasion in February, Russia has repeatedly scaled back its imperialist ambitions for Ukraine, as it learns that a population it thought would welcome them with open arms would fight and die for every inch of Ukrainian land.

Odesa is still in Putin’s sights and as such the waters of its coast remain mined, missiles regularly strike and the city’s people are far from relaxed.

“Of course we’re scared,” says one of Yelena’s swimming partners. Pointing at the large paper cup in her hand, she adds: “That’s why we drink beer.”

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Fear

During peacetime Odesa is a popular coastal resort city where tourists spend their days on the beaches, the evenings strolling the wide, leafy 19th-century boulevards and the nights, in one of the countless restaurants and clubs perched on the sands overlooking the sea.

In wartime, the tourists are fewer but families still arrive seeking refuge or a temporary escape from other parts of the country.

But the war is never far away. “We’re trying to carry on working because people are coming here to rest and to forget about the neg