There is a new edginess in people as the attacks come more and more regularly. I can see it on my friends’ faces as they check the news on their phones.
A rescuer stands in a residential area hit by a Russian missile strike in Odessa, Ukraine, on March 15. ODESSA, Ukraine — March 15 was a normal, drizzly Friday. At 10 a.m., when a “double tap” attack of Russian Iskander-M missiles fired from Crimea hit the southern neighborhood of Dacha Kovalevskovo, my Odessite friends were busy with their regular daily stuff: Misha Reva, an artist, was at work on a sculpture in his atelier.
President Vladimir Putin launched the attack on the first day of Russia’s farcically misnamed presidential “election.” It might have not been intended symbolically. Perhaps it was just “one more”: the attack was the third major assault on Odessa in two weeks. On March 2, in the northern neighborhood of Peresyp,
five children. The apartment block now has this dollhouse look: with part of the building stripped away, you see the interior of the apartments. Four days later at the port, some 300 meters from where President Volodymyr Zelensky and visiting Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis were getting into a car, aThe day before this latest attack, I attended a conference. It was held in the cellar of a hotel.
hardly anyone runs to shelters anymore. But the alarms are disruptive. Below ground, the conference couldLater that evening, at a friend’s house for drinks and dinner, we were reminded again of the war: We had to wrap up because the city — like the rest of Ukraine — is under curfew. People here try to lead a normal life, but it is an imitation of normality. Take my friends: Misha has for the past two years beenfrom war debris, which — like Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” — convey the horrors of war. Nika travels to Kyiv to help procure both drones and antidrone weapons, so crucial for the defense of Odessa. Sasha sends first aid kits to military units in Kherson, something every soldier needs that is all-too-frequently not provided by the Ministry of Defense.