“Odessa has become a fortress”, Mayor Gennady Troukhanov has been swearing for several days. The majority of this Ukrainian city on the shores of the Black Sea, however, remains devoid of the barricades and checkpoints that block the streets of many other cities in Ukraine.
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The only exception, a hypercentre now completely cordoned off, its streets strewn with puncture nails and anti-tank obstacles, its statue of the Duke of Richelieu – governor of the city at the beginning of the 19th century – disappeared under a pile of sandbags.
A human chain
If the fortress is not yet literal, the mobilization of all the living forces of the city is already clearly visible. At the very end of the tired concrete docks of Odessa’s “Chornormorskiy” yacht club, volunteers make a human chain to fill sandbags from the nearby beach to the vans and pickups that keep arriving throughout throughout the day. “The most important event of my life”, smiles Marina Vasiliouk, event manager of barely 22 years old, at the origin of this initiative.
War in Ukraine: in Odessa, the slow hemorrhage of departure
As in other regions of the country, the defense of Odessa requires close cooperation between the authorities and a civil society heated white by the Russian invasion. A cooperation dominated by the tutelary figure of the local mayor, Gennady Troukhanov. In a city where all eyes have long continued to turn to Moscow and where the 2014 revolution has been viewed with suspicion, this controversial personality has donned, in the face of the Russian threat, the garb of a warlord, appearing in front of the barricades and swearing on social networks to protect the city until the end.
Which leaves Oleg Mikhaïlik skeptical. “He turned his jacket around again”, loose this well-known anti-corruption activist and politician from Odessa. This morning, Oleg swapped his laptop for a Kalashnikov assault rifle which he brings to a discreet bar-theater transformed into a logistics base for the volunteers preparing the defense of Odessa.
An undisguised distrust
The man observes the transformation of the mayor of Odessa into a patriotic warlord with undisguised suspicion: “Now he’s saying ‘Putin is garbage’ and ‘Russian ship, fuck you’, but of course I can’t trust him: he’s corrupt and has a Russian passport. » Struggling for several years with local elites whom he denounces as closely linked to the underworld of Odessa, Oleg Mikhaïlik was the victim in 2018 of an assassination attempt and accuses the mayor of being the sponsor.
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Strategic port on the Black Sea, and one of the most dynamic cities of the Russian Empire, Odessa continues to cultivate its myths. If that of a multicultural city was torn apart by the Holocaust and the exodus of Jews from Odessa after the Second World War, that of a criminal city remains alive, down to the figure of its mayor.
A child of the country, this former artillery officer of the Soviet Union studied in the 1990s at the head of a security company before rising in rank within the “Party of Regions”, of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, overthrown in 2014. In 2018, the BBC goes through the Panama Papers and describes him as a former member of a “extremely violent gang”.
The mayor of Odessa’s initial reaction to the Russian invasion did not reassure activists. In a video published on February 25, Gennady Troukhanov vaguely evokes a “complex situation” and, without ever saying the words ” war “ Where “Russia”ensures that his team “will do everything possible, and even the impossible, to keep life going”. Stunning, or caution? “My sources at the town hall tell me that he was deeply shocked the first two days, he simply did not believe that the Russians would dare to attack”, says a local journalist.
“Today, the nation is united”
“But then he recovered and manages the city and mobilizes the population”, he assures. The mayor donned a khaki jacket, embellished with a yellow armband, a symbol of resistance to the Russian invader. He was followed by most of the local elite, including several members of the pro-Russian party “Opposition Platform – For Life”, who did not hesitate to denounce the attack on Moscow.
“Today, the nation is united”, assures this same journalist adding that “this is clearly not the time for stories of corruption, we will see that after the war”. At the Odessa yacht club, Lioudmila Shevtchouk, co-organizer of the volunteer movement, gets annoyed: “We have people and we have sand, but we lack bags, we ask the city to send us some, we say we can pay, but they refuse. »
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Beyond the powerful mayor of Odessa, others were able to take advantage of the Russian invasion to apply a coat of patriotic varnish to controversial careers. The former local police chief and former district prosecutor, recently arrested and released on bail in corruption cases, announced in the days following the invasion that they wanted to transfer the amount of their bail to the army Ukrainian.
Almost immediately, former police chief Dmitry Golovin returned to the police ranks as an adviser in charge of relations with the city’s security companies involved in the defense of Odessa. How would this local elite behave if the Russian army were to enter the city? Even Oleg Mikhailnik has no doubts about it: “The whole town will fight, even those city council bastards. »