Ukraine's Strongest Weapon is Societal Resilience. A Report from Odesa.

— SPECIAL REPORT —

2023/11/06

UKRAINE’S STRONGEST WEAPON IS SOCIETAL RESILIENCE A REPORT FROM ODESA MONIKA PALOTAI KRISTOF GYORGY VERES

UKRAINE’S STRONGEST WEAPON IS SOCIETAL RESILIENCE A REPORT FROM ODESA

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During the initial phase of the full-scale invasion, the Russian gamble to topple the government in Kyiv was thwarted owing to the unprecedented collective effort of Ukrainian society that quickly emerged as an unbreachable bulwark for Putin’s tanks. After the Russian offensive efforts largely ran out of steam on the frontlines the Kremlin shifted tactics: instead of trying to achieve victory on the battlefield, the Russians tried to destroy Ukraine’s strongest asset: unprecedented societal unity and determination behind the war effort. However, Russian rockets and drones couldn’t break Ukrainian society’s resilience so far. Identifying the myriad adaptation techniques of Ukrainians is essential in understanding and subsequently reinforcing this resilience.

Focusing on Odesa, this case study examines how Ukrainian society adapted to the incessant Russian bombing campaigns while still managing to maintain normalcy in their everyday life. This report is based on research trips conducted in 2022 September, 2023 January and July 2023 to Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv and Dnipro.

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UKRAINE’S STRONGEST WEAPON IS SOCIETAL RESILIENCE A REPORT FROM ODESA

The air-raid application went off on our phones around 2 am. During the previous 10 days that we spent in Kyiv, we learned to trust the nigh impregnable air defenses of the Ukrainian capital, Odesa however, was a different matter. We arrived in the port city 2 days after the Russians renewed their brutal bombing campaign of Odesa following their withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative. We couldn’t immediately shed the feeling of the relative safety of Kyiv: we muted the warning – voiced by Mark Hamill – on our phones and went back to sleep.

The explosion 10 minutes later – followed by a bright white flash – occurred so close to our hotel that the windows of our rooms reverberated from the shockwave. Jumping out of bed and grabbing our electronics, wallets and passports, we quickly followed the arrows pointing us to the shelter. Our guide from Kyiv, Andy the previous day pointed it out to us that the only Ukrainian-language signs in the hotel were the ones guiding the residents to the shelter – everything else was (still) in Russian. The irony of course was not lost on us.

Our hotel didn’t have a “real” shelter, we took cover in the non-functioning spa in the basement.

A blonde, 20-ish woman was already laying on a couch in a bathrobe resting her head on a bunch of pillows that she must have taken from her room. She was sleeping. “Did she come when the sirens went off, or was she already there not wanting to get up in the middle of the evening?”

As the onslaught of rockets and drones went on, people continued to slowly trickle in: a middle-aged women with a toddler, older men wearing work fatigues. There was no panic, only calm, quite resignation. Some of them didn’t really look like guests from the hotel. A few dozed off in sitting position, others were tiredly scrolling on their phones. The whole scene, all these quiet, tired people sitting together in a dimly lit room in the small hours reminded us of the waiting room www.warsawinstitute.org

of a rural railway station before dawn. After half an hour the spa was full of “commuters.”

We started checking the twitter and telegram channels covering the bombings. “Explosions reported in Odesa RIGHT NOW!” As we gradually learned during our previous stays in war-torn Ukraine, the decision whether to go to a shelter or not once the sirens started shrieking was a complex one. The most important factor – as in real-estate – is location, location, location.

Roughly a year ago, during our first trip to Ukraine the rule of thumb was the following: avoid the city centers, they are prime targets!

Stay in the suburbs! However, the massive influx of NATO air-defense systems during the fall and winter of 2022 flipped that equation. Ukraine positioned these new assets to protect major urban centers, while suburbs, and the agglomeration of big cities are less protected. Moreover, Ukrainian air-defenses can sometimes only intercept Russian missiles and drones above the suburbs resulting in burning metal pieces raining down on the area. During our stay in Kyiv, Andy showed us the recent minor damage to the windows of his apartment complex in Sofiivska Borschahivka – just outside the city limits of Kyiv.

Another loud explosion – this one sounded really close. Generally speaking, urban centers were safer, but the Russians had been throwing everything they had at Odesa since the grain deal went defunct. In Kyiv, Maksym Skrypchenko, president of the Transatlantic Dialogue Center told us that the massive concentration of Western air defenses around the capital is a source of some resentment elsewhere in Ukraine, where the AD capabilities are more limited. He jokingly added that that the Verkhovna Rada was the safest place in Kyiv not just because of the air defenses, but also owing to its close proximity to the Chinese embassy. The Russians would never dare targeting the Rada with their missiles that tend to miss. By chance, our hotel in Odesa was right next to the local Confucius Institute – we should Special Report

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UKRAINE’S STRONGEST WEAPON IS SOCIETAL RESILIENCE A REPORT FROM ODESA

DSNS.GOV.UA

be safe right? Well, the next morning we learned that the Chinese Consulate in the port city was also lightly damaged that evening.

More than an hour had passed since the beginning of the assault. Andy was already sleeping on a reclining chair next to us. We were still riding our adrenaline wave. According to the twitter channel “Ukraine Front Lines” the Russians were launching volley after volley of missiles and kamikaze drones at Odesa, Mykolaiv and Chornomorks – the Ukrainian port cities that were previously covered by the grain deal.

Social media is an essential tool in assessing the severity of any air raid. The sirens go off even when a pair of Russians bombers are spotted over the Black Sea. However, no one would take cover in a shelter because of two lousy Tu-22M cruising dozens of miles off the coast. This evening, however, it was a sustained major attack – the third day in a row.

A lot had changed in Odesa since our previous visit in January 2023. Arriving by car, we were surprised to see that the military checkpoints set up on the roads leading to the city had been 4

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significantly scaled back, the soldiers were only doing random checks instead of thoroughly examining every vehicle. We’d seen the same in Kyiv: most of the patrolling soldiers were gone from downtown, the tank traps and sandbags on the square in front of our hotel had been replaced by workers planting flowers, bushes, and saplings in the summer heat. The roads were also being repaired in the capital. Plugging potholes and planting geranium has been a source of contention between the major of Kyiv, Vitalij Klicsko and President Zelensky – the latter calling these works a waste of money during the war. The partial road closures made the insane traffic jams in the busy capital even worse: we arrived late at almost every meeting we had.

The return to normalcy was even more marked in Odesa though. The wider area around the Opera House felt like a fortified military installation in January complete with patrolling soldiers preventing anyone from taking pictures. Even an innocent selfie with the façade of the Opera was strictly verboten during that winter of darkness.

Even then, the flame of culture never fizzled out: www.warsawinstitute.org

UKRAINE’S STRONGEST WEAPON IS SOCIETAL RESILIENCE A REPORT FROM ODESA

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stumbling on wet cobblestones, with only the built-in flashlights of our phones guiding us, completely disoriented from the deafening roar of the portable generators on the streets we were among the people who made their way to the Opera in January to attend a performance of the Barber of Sevilla.

Winter was over now: the electrical grid was fully functional, the generators – like the military installations – were gone, and we could finally take the vaunted picture with the Opera House. The Potemkin stairs – immortalized by Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 movie – were still off limits though.

However, even this closure projected a sense of normalcy: there were no concrete blocks stacked atop eachother as giant Legos, no tank traps, sandbags or barbed wire. Just a regular 5-foot-tall aluminum fence, some tape and a few small signs.

We expected to find Odesa in a similar shape than the Eastern industrial metropolis of Dnipro – calm, fully “functional”, but at the same time eerily empty. The Pearl of the Black Sea, however, was bustling with life. Families with small children playing in the City Garden, merchants www.warsawinstitute.org

selling cotton candy, balloons, beverages. University-age students drinking and singing in packed bars and on the street, queues in front of restaurants offering live music. Nothing indicated that Putin renewed his carnage of the port city two days before. If anything, it only boosted the sales of the “Putin Huylo” beer – the drink named after a popular Ukrainian insult comes in a bottle featuring a cartoon of the Russian president in an obscene position. The waiters in Odesa just kept recommending it to us.

One thing was obviously missing from the city though: the statue of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (1762–1796) was removed in December, 2022 only to be replaced by a Ukrainian flag.

After the launch of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, popular attitudes towards Russian cultural heritage, as well as towards the Russian language itself went through a seismic shift. According to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll conducted in December 2022, 58% of the participants thought that the Russian language was not important at all for citizens Special Report

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UKRAINE’S STRONGEST WEAPON IS SOCIETAL RESILIENCE A REPORT FROM ODESA

of Ukraine. In 2017 – 3 years after the annexation of Crimea, and the beginning of the war in Donbas – only 9% of polled Ukrainians thought so. The same survey found that 80% of the polled population would like to see Ukrainian the main language in all spheres of communication.

Despite of the fact that only 57% claimed to use only or mainly Ukrainian in their everyday life, with 24% using both languages equally and 15% relying predominantly on Russian.

Such change in attitudes doesn’t come without conflict, and it doesn’t proceed at a uniform pace in a diverse country like Ukraine. Derussification has been steaming ahead in Kyiv since the start of the full-scale invasion: while the Ukrainian capital was already scrapping Pushkin and Tolstoy from its map, the mayor of Odesa opposed the removal of the monument to the Empress of Imperial Russian as late as August 2022.

Not everyone is fine-tuned to the everyday implications of the new reality brought about by Putin’s brutal invasion, especially in Odesa, a predominantly Russian-speaking metropolis on the eve of the war. Only 3 hours before the sirens heralded in another evening of terror, we stumbled into a group of people in their early twenties singing along with a guitar – in Russian.

Our guide, Andy – himself a singer – immediately went ballistic. “They are singing a song from Polina Gagarina! She appeared at a pro-Putin rally to support the invasion wearing the letter Z!” Indeed, after the highly controversial event held in Moscow in March 2022, Gagarina was banned from Estonia and Latvia. The silver medalist of the 2015 Eurovision song competition, is also sanctioned by Canada for “peddling Russian disinformation and propaganda.” Andy darted to the organizers, but they were dismissive: “It’s just a pop-song that people like. People are singing along.”

Enter derussification. Since June 2022, there has been a ban in Ukraine on playing music 6

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by post-1991 Russian citizens on any media.

The police were swiftly called. By the time they showed up, however, the singing shifted to patriotic Ukrainian songs. The officers calmly explained to us, that the law in question does not apply to a bunch of youngster singing Russian pop-songs on the streets. Unlike in Kyiv, where there has been a “temporarily” ban on singing in Russian on the streets. It is highly questionable, however, if the enforcement of this symbolic act by the city council would stand in a court of law.

The police officers wrapped up our conversation by adding that they will have a little chat with the performers about what is appropriate to sing between two Russian missile barrages, and what might be not.

The telegram and twitter channels went silent around 3.30 AM, however that didn’t mean that the air raid was officially over, it just signaled that the Russians stopped launching missiles and drones. We waited a good 15 minutes – just to be on the safe side – and then we joined a couple of people smoking outside of the hotel. The eerie quiet was sporadically punctuated by the wailing of rushing ambulances in the distance. We’d just finished our third cigarette when the sirens finally sounded the monotone, high-pitched “all clear.”

We went back to the spa/shelter to grab our belongings. The blonde woman in the bathrobe was already gone. We woke Andy up, and finally went back to our rooms.

A mere 4 hours later at breakfast nothing was out of the ordinary. A perfectly dressed, smiling staff was serving us our beloved sirnykys – the heavenly Ukrainian cottage-cheese cakes. Odesa was the same bustling metropolis that day: Arcadia beach already felt like one big party at 3 PM, with loud music coming from every bar and restaurant. Crowds of people dancing along on the boardwalk sipping their cocktails. Bathing in the Black Sea though was still a no-no until mid-August because of the naval mines bobbing around under the crashing waves. Instead, for 100 hryvnias (appr. $2.7) anyone could throw www.warsawinstitute.org

UKRAINE’S STRONGEST WEAPON IS SOCIETAL RESILIENCE A REPORT FROM ODESA

darts at the picture of Putin in hope of winning – well, not the war –, but a bottle of whiskey. On Arcadia beach the shriek of the air-raid sirens around 7 PM was almost drowned out by the dance music blasting from the clubs. Anyway, this time it was just a pair of Russian planes spotted by the Ukrainian Air Defenses. The party went on unabated – up until the start of the military curfew at midnight, when people wished each other “a quite night.”

We couldn’t shake the feeling that the dancing on Arcadia beach in the hot July sunset and the evenings spent in shelters came hand-in-hand. Far from being some grotesque Danse Macabre, what we witnessed on the boardwalk felt more like a celebration of life, the life that the war cannot

take away from Ukrainians. A safety valve to vent the stress, an intense flash of normalcy to keep the spirits up during those clear summer nights when rockets are falling from the sky instead of shooting stars. Finally, a snub at the aggressor: extensive damage to critical infrastructure causing power and heat outages couldn’t beat the population into submission during the winter and evenings spent in shelters without sleep during the summer won’t do it either. Maybe desperately clinging on to these shards of a normal life is what propels the country to continue its struggle.

All in all, for millions of Ukrainians another ordinary day came to a close, and they soldiered on.

author: Monika Palotai Monika Palotai is research fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute, former Visiting Research Fellow at Hudson Institute in Washington DC

author: Kristof Gyorgy Veres Kristof Gyorgy Veres is a senior research fellow at the Danube Institute (Budapest), and a non-resident expert at the Warsaw Institute

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