Covered with numbers and parentheses, the blackboards of the National Maritime Academy in Odessa are an invitation to travel. “Either a cargo ship which connects Odessa to Naples, states the law professor from the Maritime and River Management section. Knowing that the distance between ports is 1,700 nautical miles, the speed of the ship is 16.5 knots, calculate the sailing time if the additional travel time is 0.8 days… » Yet another alert breaks the silence of the classroom, in these first signs of spring. End of exercise. Solving the open sea equation will have to wait. The students of the prestigious naval school, whose reputation has traveled the seas of the globe for eighty years, put away their kits to follow their class leader, the one whose jacket wears yellow chevrons.
Among them, Anna R., an 18-year-old student with blonde braids, a sailor collar and a striped swimsuit. She knows shelters, missiles too: she comes from Mariupol. In recent weeks, she has once again heard drones drilling into buildings when Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses fail to protect Odessa from Russian strikes, often fired from the Black Sea. “In February 2022, the port expected a land attack, recalls Dmytro Pletentchouk, spokesperson for the Ukrainian naval forces, who meets in a discreet park. But the city of Mykolaiv blocked the Russians from entering Odessa. Here, today, the war is waged from the sea.” On April 10, four more people died, including a 10-year-old girl. A few days earlier, the city was plunged into darkness. And Volodymyr Zelensky, who met Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek Prime Minister, in the port on March 6, himself saw a missile crash 500 meters from him.
As in 2022, the Odessites take refuge in the catacombs, which no tourists are anymore there to visit. Fog horns and ship whistles resound again in the harbor of the country’s largest seaport, since the lifting, in the fall of 2022, of the blockade imposed for six months by Russia, but not a cruise ship has has been stopping over in Odessa for two years. For the rare walkers, photos against the backdrop of the Black Sea and selfies in front of the Vorontsov lighthouse are not recommended. The SBU, the Ukrainian secret service, monitors social networks, and neither Instagram nor TikTok must give indications to the enemy.
In the windows of souvenir shops, models of cargo ships and sailing boats gather dust, waiting for who knows who, who knows what. In front of the cathedral, destroyed last summer by a strike, the amateur paintings of the city await the barge, kitsch, garish. The Museum of Fine Arts, also affected, protects itself with plywood, and the famous International Film Festival, which so enjoyed welcoming Catherine Deneuve, one of the rare French actresses to publicly defend Ukraine, and where, every July, attended by stars from all over the world, takes place today in kyiv and Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine.
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