In Ukraine’s Odessa, a new way of life is developing. As Putin targets there – as elsewhere – the city’s power-stations and general infrastructure, people are adapting fast. There are news reports of women drying their hair in electrical stores, or of men plugging in their shavers in shopping malls. One enterprising beautician has set up stall in an underground car park, and gives people manicures by battery-powered light. A local notary’s office, I’m told, finding the electricity cutting out just as they were printing a document, searched the neighbourhood for a café where they could plug in the printer and finish the job. ‘It takes so much of your energy, all this,’ says one Odessan resident. ‘And your time.’
The Odessan lady I’m talking to is Olya, a Ukrainian living five years in Georgia who recently returned to her home city amidst the frequent power-cuts. Though she speaks of the numerous inconveniences caused by them, she looks strangely radiant to have been home and seen her family. People in Georgia thought she was crazy to be going back to a country at war. ”Isn’t that dangerous?’ they all asked me. But I was strangely attracted by the danger – I wanted to be there in my country when those things were happening – and, of course, I wanted to see my family. That was number one.’
Before people steeled themselves for missiles hitting their homes, now they worry more about infrastructure coming under attack
Apart from a brief trip in August, Olya hadn’t seen her parents since February last year. She’d been in Odessa when war broke out but had a flight booked back to Georgia and her husband. The February day she got on the plane to Tbilisi and said goodbye to her parents was, she says ‘one of the worst days of my life and one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make. That awful feeling of betraying them and leaving them there in absolute uncertainty. Would I ever see them again?’
Being apart from them in the first few months of the war, checking her mobile three times a night to see if they were okay, she felt ‘overloaded with fear and guilt’, with ‘fruitless attempts to structure my thoughts and get back to my everyday routine.’ She repeatedly sent money back home to Odessa, even though her family said they didn’t need it. ‘It was one way to feel you were doing something. It helped you not to feel helpless.’ Amidst all this was a terrible disappointment at the turn history had taken: ‘There was the feeling of a loss. My country was flourishing – up until the moment Russians decided we needed their ‘help”.
The fierce anger she also felt in the first months of the war – ‘I hated the Russian regime and I wanted everyone to hate it, without exceptions’ – was soon replaced by ‘pride and hope…I would never have believed Ukrainians could become so brave.’ She was, she said, still the ‘victim of Soviet propaganda, the idea that all other nationalities of the USSR were inferior to the Russians and needed a big brother to direct them.’
It wasn’t just the army she felt so elated with, but ‘ordinary people – surgeons performing operations with missiles flying overhead, elderly women blocking the paths of tanks, that Kyiv lady who they said brought down a drone with a jar of pickles’. (Local journalists did some research and found the last example to be untrue: it had, it seems, been a tin of tomatoes).
Yet despite this spirited reaction to events Olya describes a feeling of palpable dejection when she returned. ‘It seemed to me it was in the air…People are becoming desperate. You feel it as soon as you cross the border into the country. This silence everywhere.’ During power-cuts there was total darkness in the streets – ‘the only light comes from passing cars, which are driven very, very carefully. Even the traffic lights don’t work.’
Where before people steeled themselves for missiles hitting their homes, now they worry more about the infrastructure coming under attack and upending their lives. It has, it seems, put the Ukrainians into a different psychological state. ‘The focus has changed now,’ Olya tells me. ‘It’s the difference between a car crash and a slow, creeping illness. Right now we’re in the early stages, learning what steps we need to cope with that disease. But it takes all your energy.’
One precaution people are taking is to use ‘accumulators’ to store up electricity, or buying generators – if they have detached houses. In flats, where generators can’t be used, ‘you just have to wait for the electricity to come on again.’ For those who can buy them, the price of generators has skyrocketed. People are paying about $1500 (£1200) for them – the average Ukrainian salary before the war was about $570 (£480) a month, and one dreads to think what it is now. There is an Odessan meme in circulation which says: ‘Elon Musk is no longer the wealthiest person in the world. Salesmen of generators in Odessa have overtaken him.’
One of the most disruptive things, Olya explains, is that blackouts destroy your sleep patterns. While in Kyiv there’s a timetable for power-cuts, in Odessa they’re unpredictable and citizens are grabbing electricity where they can, whatever the time of day.
‘It was midnight the other night when the electricity came back on,’ she adds. ‘My mother refused to go to sleep. ‘I can’t go to bed when the electricity’s on. I won’t have another chance to watch Christmas films.’ Her mother was up till six in the morning watching the TV: ‘Until the electricity went off again.’
Another problem was her father’s aquarium, which needed a plug-in heater to keep the tropical fish alive. The family found an ingenious solution, filling plastic bottles with hot water and dotting them about the tank to keep the water warm. A state aquarium in Dnipro, another Ukrainian city, wasn’t so lucky. Fifty fish have died because of heating problems, and in temperatures well below zero even the zoo’s crocodile, Gena, is fighting for survival.
But there have been strange, unexpected benefits too. ‘People have started looking into each other’s eyes again, instead of their gadgets. You can’t play computer games. You can’t watch TV. So you just talk. I don’t think I’ve ever talked so much to my parents. And the conversations, they were so sincere, so open…’
Olya’s father, she said, had sent her a message in the middle of the day to tell her he loved her – ‘I never got messages like that from him before. When I asked him later what was up, he told me: ‘I regret not giving you more attention in childhood. And I decided not to postpone any more.’ A new depth of living has come about, it seems, in Ukraine. ‘All the feelings are more intense. Despair, joy, love, hatred, everything. People are living in the present. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen…not even tomorrow, not even the next hour.’
The people she knows in Odessa are also talking much less about politics. No one on her last trip discussed the recently annexed territories in Lugansk, Donetsk and beyond. ‘It’s quite a change, because in August everyone was talking about the territories. Maybe they are worn out… They read the news, they exchange the news but then they don’t start…you know…complaining. When people have some energy now they want to direct it onto something worthwhile, like talking, playing cards, looking at the fish in the aquarium. The first months were so shocking we didn’t actually have this choice, to talk about the war or ignore it. Now people can choose, and I think they just choose to…live.’
I tell Olya I’m perversely almost envious of her return to Ukraine. ‘No, no,’ she says. ‘I mustn’t make it sound too colourful. That’s not reality; there is nothing good there. People are dying. Ukrainians are trying to be happy, but they can’t be carefree any more. You really feel this when you enter the country. And feeling carefree is…such an important thing, I think.’
But, she adds firmly, they are far from broken: ‘In the streets you sometimes hear people saying goodbye to with the words ‘pobeda y mira’ – ‘Victory and Peace’. They’re not so desperate that they want to give up. They just want to end this chaos.’
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