NEON SIGNS advertising oysters and sparkling wine speak of an era that ended abruptly on the morning of February 24th, when Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine. The Odessa Food Market on Richelievska Street was once a place of hipsters and flat whites. For 12 days now, it has served as a logistical hub for the war effort. It’s a hive of activity, with dozens of yellow-jacketed volunteers buzzing between the market’s two floors. They sort donations—from food rations and medicine to tampons and shampoo—onto shelves ready to be taken to the front lines. Time may be of the essence, they say. So far the city has been spared violence, though there have been some attacks in its surrounding region. But on March 6th President Volodymyr Zelensky warned of intelligence indicating an imminent rocket-led attack on Ukraine’s third city.
Odessa, a cosmopolitan port founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great on the coast of the Black Sea, would be a big prize for Mr Putin. The city is both a strategic military prize and an important commercial centre. It has huge symbolic value, too: it holds a treasured place in Russia’s history and culture. Odessa featured prominently in Mr Putin’s rambling speech of February 21st, which laid the ground for the invasion. He specifically mentioned the events of May 2nd 2014, when 48 mostly pro-Russian protesters died in the city after clashes with Ukrainian nationalists. It appears that Mr Putin believed that his invasion would find support among the local population. But if it was a debatable proposition then, it is much harder to believe today.
The city, like the food market, has been transformed by war. From an unsentimental place reluctant to take sides, it is now adorned in yellow and blue. Ukrainian flags fly from every street corner, from cars, from apartments. The city’s diverse populations—intellectuals, gangsters, artists, workers—are pulling together ahead of the expected attack. Young volunteers pack sandbags at the beach. Engineers at the tram depot make anti-tank “hedgehogs” from old bits of rail. Some of these barricades have been installed on Deribasovskaya Street, Odessa's central boulevard, and around the nearby opera house and municipal buildings. As bloggers have noted, the scene has more in common with black-and-white prints from the second world war than it does with the reality of just two weeks ago.
Odessa’s heroic struggle against Nazi barbarism—the city lived through a siege, occupation and the mass murder of its Jews—has become a galvanising memory. It is being invoked in the most unexpected of quarters. Gennadiy Trukhanov, the city’s bruiser of a mayor, a man long accused of rooting for Russia, tells The Economist that he believes Mr Putin’s men are “behaving like fascists”. The indiscriminate bombing of residential districts and churches in Kharkiv and Mariupol in the Russian-speaking east is unforgivable, he says. The ferocity of the attacks has shattered any previous illusions he might have had. Mr Putin has become drunk on power and fame. “He seems to think he has supernatural powers.”
The invasion has united most strands of Odessa’s usually fractious politics. Mr Trukhanov not only finds himself acting in unison with political opponents, but also with the city’s usually disapproving intellectuals. They express mild bewilderment at the alliance. Speaking at his bungalow on the outskirts of the city, Boris Khersonsky, a writer and poet, argues that the mayor’s patriotic realignment was partly situational—”Authenticity and Trukhanov do not always go together,” he says—and partly reflects a genuine shift in the Russian-speaking population. Even before February 24th, Odessans were turning their back on Russia, put off by its draconian laws, the banning of free speech, and by “a time machine that only goes backwards”. After 12 days of war, the poet predicts, they will not be waiting for Mr Putin's soldiers with flowers.
It is impossible to know quite how the chips will fall in the event of an attempted invasion. Since 2014 those with pro-Russian sentiments have either been driven away or underground. But Alexander Prigarin, an academic closely associated with the city’s Russian sympathisers, insists ordinary citizens have not abandoned their basic “pragmatic, mercantilist” identity. A majority look to see who is in power, he argues. “If South Africa turns up tomorrow, people will start flying the South African flag.” Alexander Babich, a local historian on the other end of the spectrum, with staunch pro-Ukrainian views, echoes that assessment. He says a significant number of locals would be ready to collaborate. “There are people who want Russians here for things to calm down so they can go to the sea and walk their dogs again.”
Yet Mr Babich believes that 12 days of successful resistance means that it may never come to that. After suffering what appear to be serious losses trying to take the port of Mykolayiv to the east, a crucial step on the road from Crimea to Odessa, Mr Babich thinks that Mr Putin would not dare risk an amphibious landing at a much better-prepared city. And even if Russia’s president were to decide on a “suicidal” mission, enough hostile locals like him are waiting to repel him, Mr Babich argues. He has prepared for any eventuality: evacuating his family to the Czech Republic, sharpening up skills learned in an earlier life as a special-forces officer, and filling his home with weapons “of all descriptions”. He says that nine out of ten of his friends have made similar arrangements. “We're not samurais, and we won’t go out on the streets with swords, but we sure as hell know how to stop the tanks.”