ODESSA HAS endured a lot over the past four years, but in December it experienced a new level of assault. On the night of December 11th-12th Russia launched an unprecedented blitz, pummelling the city with a record 300 drones, bombs and missiles. By morning the region was without electricity, water or heat, and a ship in the port was burning. In the days that followed blackouts became routine, and many denizens relied on pop-up soup kitchens for meals. On December 18th Russia added the threat of physical isolation by striking the Mayaky bridge, a key point on a highway that links the city to Moldova and Europe. That attack killed a mother and injured three children. The next day the Russians hit civilian port infrastructure near the city, killing eight more, including a lorry driver waiting to load grain.
The bombardment has frayed nerves in the exhausted region. Its military significance appears limited, but the economic and political impact is anything but. Ukraine’s third-largest city plays an outsize role in Ukraine’s export-oriented economy, which depends on cheap routes to market. Before the war, Odessa’s three deep-sea ports handled roughly 60% of all exports. In 2023 Ukraine defied Russia’s naval blockade and re-opened a shipping corridor through the Black Sea. Before the latest attacks its share of Ukraine’s exports (which have been reduced by the war) had grown to 60–70%.
Russia’s blitz puts much of that trade at risk. The ports need 12 megawatts of power to work at full capacity; they now have only two. Loading is limited to the few hours in the day without air-raid alerts. Sources say they are operating at just 30–35% of demand. Delays can render Ukrainian exports uncompetitive. They also complicate insurance: most ships are covered for only a limited time in Ukrainian waters.
That the ports function at all is thanks to insurance, expensive generators and the iron will of labourers working under open skies. Providing air-defence systems used to be a priority for Ukraine’s Western allies, enabling defenders to intercept missiles above the port. That is now essentially absent. Ballistic missiles launched from Crimea land in little over a minute and a half, leaving only seconds to run for shelter. Cluster munitions massively increase the target areas where workers are at risk, and Russia has begun using new weapons like jet-powered drones and bombs. Salvage operations and the smell of burning are part of everyday life. “Everyone is frightened,” says Oleksiy Smolyar, a maritime services executive. “Insurers are hurting too, but no one wants to leave. It’s business. It’s money.”
Vladimir Putin has long been fixated on Odessa. He is not alone: the city retains a mystical attraction for many Russians, a legacy of its history as a cosmopolitan free port in the Russian empire. (The feeling is no longer entirely mutual. As one new local joke puts it, “We don’t need electricity to see the Russians are terrorists.”) A week before the bombardment began, Mr Putin raised eyebrows by declaring he planned to seize not only eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region but all of “Novorossiya”, an administrative district of the former Russian empire that included Odessa.
In military terms, such bravado seems absurd. Ukraine’s growing fleet of naval drones means the city is no longer vulnerable to encirclement, as it once was. Recent Ukrainian strikes on Russia’s shadow-fleet tankers and on a submarine in Novorossiysk, a naval base across the Black Sea, suggest Russia’s control of the sea is shrinking, not expanding. Dmytro Pletenchuk, a spokesman for Ukraine’s southern defensive grouping, claims that the submarine was badly damaged by hydraulic shock, noting that it failed to move during a recent alert. “They will lose all their ships in the Black Sea,” he predicts. “They can’t just throw more men at the problem like they do elsewhere. This is an intellectual battle, and so they are losing.”
A more realistic Russian aim is to exploit local political tensions. Many in the region are ambivalent about being ruled from Kyiv; a few are even sympathetic to Russia. Pro-Kremlin social-media channels seed protests by the pro-Russian fringe, while spreading cataclysmic predictions and conspiracy theories to the general audience. One bit of disinformation alleges that Odessa’s blackouts are a result of the government in Kyiv selling power abroad. So far such manipulations have had only limited effect. In Kotovskyi, a residential district far from the city centre, about a dozen people blocked a road after going days without power. They drew little regional support, but the “protests” were reported widely in Russian media.
For now, the bombardment is doing as much to organise Odessans as to demoralise them. Locals report a new sense of community spirit. Businesses and homes with electricity are opening their doors to those without. Social media has filled with offers of free laundry, showers and co-working desks. Emergency workers and the local power company have restored electricity to homes at a record pace. President Volodymyr Zelensky belatedly dispatched a team of senior officials, dismissed the local air-defence commander and declared his government would fight for Odessa. Ukraine’s long-term viability as a nation depends heavily on keeping the city and its ports running.