In Odesa, Ukraine’s southern city, where even dark times cannot suppress joie de vivre, everything is normal, until it isn’t. In the fourth year of the war, the city is buzzing with life. Most of its street cafés are open, packed with locals and visitors drinking and chatting underneath the capacious horse-chestnut trees and acacias.
Then the eerie rise-and-fall wail of an air raid siren cuts through the bustle. Many people head for the underground shelters. Some do not. When I visited in April, a siren sounded as I was taking a taxi across town. The driver pulled over and consulted an app on his phone that was tracking the Russian rocket. “It’s going north of the city, we are fine,” he said with a shrug, and we drove on.
Sometimes the missiles do hit, however. On the evening of Friday January 31 this year, Kateryna Korshomna, a violinist in the Odesa Philharmonic Orchestra, was finishing teaching at the Musical Academy, having had a rehearsal at the Philharmonic Hall for a concert to be performed there the following night. As she was chatting to friends, the air raid sirens sounded, and they began tracking a rocket headed straight for the city on their phones. They hesitated and did not get to a bomb shelter. (You have about 10 minutes to find safety.) Before long there were explosions, Korshomna told me. “And then we were getting messages that it had hit the centre of the city.”