Is this where Vladimir Putin’s imperial dream is decided? A journey to the glamorous, literary, free city on the Black Sea. Where people are waiting for the Russians to attack.
In Palanka, on the border with the Republic of Moldova, we entered Ukraine. Alexander Garachuk, Professor of French Civilization, awaits us. With his humorous gaze, his tousled white mane, and his instant confession that he never really knows whether he’s Ukrainian, Pole, Lithuanian, Jew, German, or French, he exemplifies the spirit of Odessa that Pushkin described as a happy one mixture of cosmopolitanism, libertarian sentiment and irony. It takes an hour for us to pass the ten checkpoints, which consist of anti-tank obstacles, mountains of sandbags and concrete walls, and which filter everything that wants to come in. Then we arrived – my comrades-in-arms Gilles Hertzog, Marc Roussel and I – in Odessa, the so literary, so glamorous city. And today: so threatened.