Odessa

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 ...

It is impossible to know quite how the chips will fall in the event of an attempted invasion. “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.” 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. 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. Some of these barricades have been installed on Deribasovskaya Street, Odessa's central boulevard, and around the nearby opera house and municipal buildings. Odessa featured prominently in Mr Putin’s rambling speech of February 21st, which laid the ground for the invasion. The city’s diverse populations—intellectuals, gangsters, artists, workers—are pulling together ahead of the expected attack. The city, like the food market, has been transformed by war. They sort donations—from food rations and medicine to tampons and shampoo—onto shelves ready to be taken to the front lines. He specifically mentioned the events of May 2nd 2014, when 48 mostly pro-Russian protesters died in the city after clashes with Ukrainian nationalists. For 12 days now, it has served as a logistical hub for the war effort.