[News] In Ukraine, defiant Odessa is Putin's obsession

[Deii]

Odessa is the decisive territory of the war not only because it is the access point to the Black Sea, but also because it is where the battle between Russian and Ukrainian identity



The National Museum of Fine Arts in Odessa, a 19th-century palace, is nearly empty. At the start of the Russian war against Ukraine, staff members removed more than 12,000 works for safekeeping. An enormous portrait was left in its place, that of Catherine the Great, the Russian empress and founder of Odessa, depicted as a just and victorious goddess.

Seen from below, in Dmitry Levitzky's painting, the empress is an imposing figure in a pale dress with a golden train. The ships behind her symbolize Russia's victory over the Ottoman Turks in 1792. "She is the personification of Russian imperial propaganda that you read about in history books," said Gera Grudev, an art curator. "The painting is too big to move, and besides, leaving it in her place shows the Russian invaders that we don't care."

The decision to leave Catherine's portrait hanging alone in the first room of the closed museum reflects a cunning Odesan audacity: an empress who stands by to contemplate the brutality with which Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who compares himself to a modern tsar, has displaced the mostly Russian-speaking po[CENSORED]tion of this Black Sea port, which she established in 1794 as Moscow's much-coveted conduit from the steppe to the Mediterranean.

Odessa, the world's bulk port, a city of creative integration, a metropolis with past wounds rooted in Jewish history, is the biggest prize of the war and a personal obsession for Putin. In a speech he gave three days before ordering the Russian invasion, Putin singled out Odessa with particular resentment and made clear his intention to capture the "criminals" living there to "bring them to justice."

At the beginning of the war, Putin believed that he could decapitate the Ukrainian government and take kyiv, but then he discovered that Ukraine was a nation prepared to fight for the sovereignty that he dismisses. Now that the focus of the battles has shifted to southern Ukraine, Putin knows that Ukrainians' access to the sea and, to some degree, the world's access to food depends on what happens in Odessa. Without this city, Ukraine is reduced to a dismembered landlocked state.

“Odessa is the key, in my opinion,” said François Delattre, the secretary general of the French foreign ministry. “In military terms, it is the most valuable territory. If they control it, they control the Black Sea.”

https://www.elespectador.com/mundo/europa/en-ucrania-la-desafiante-odesa-es-la-obsesion-de-putin-noticias-hoy/