Ukraine Diary 5: Leaving Odesa, Leaving Ukraine
By 
Ukraine Diary
Sunday morning we met back up with our Odesa guide and with the Dima the Perfumer. He drove us out to a Kuyalnik Estuary, a very high salt content body of water with shores were effectively salt flats. We investigated a trench that had been built last year to put Russian vehicles under fire at the narrowest point of the beach rode, then drove down and wandered the beach ourselves. After another drive we had lunch at a restaurant along the Black Sea, the only chance we’d have to see the ocean on our visit. The large group next to us opened their meal with a toast to victory and a free Ukraine, which is quite common here. After this we wandered the city a bit, including a brief visit to a local synagogue (my children have Ukrainian Jewish heritage and Odesa is an interesting space in both historical and modern terms). Odesa has a significant Jewish heritage, much of which was lost in the combined shocks of the late 19th century Tsarist pogroms, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Nazi occupation. Incidentally, touring both Odesa and Kyiv made me very happy that the Bolsheviks had not adopted the same iconoclastic tendencies as ISIS. While much early modern architecture in Ukraine and elsewhere was destroyed by the two world wars and the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks never pursued the wholesale destruction of the symbols of the old regime, meaning (at least in this part of the country) that the cities are a pleasant combination of the old, the older, the new, and the in between. In this context even the Soviet-era architecture doesn’t seem so terribly out of place. The more recent Russian contribution has involved blowing up Italian restaurants with Kinzhals…
We ended with a Lviv BBQ dinner (our Odesan guide did not hide her contempt for Lviv) where we spoke with an Army officer who had been involved in the defense of Mykolaiv (essentially rejoining the Army on the spot as the Russians advanced) and now worked in junior officer training. The war has severely attrited the Ukrainian officer corps, although he indicated that they have still managed to maintain high educational standards. His wife spoke to us about her efforts developing cooperative networks of rural villages to help handle the needs of refugees from other parts of Ukraine, providing education and reforming as many children as possible. By the way, someone in comments asked about Odesa’s reputation for corruption and organized crime. The day we arrived in the city this report dropped, indicating that the war had disrupted many of the Russian-led organized crime networks that had used the city as a base.
We returned to Kyiv on Monday morning; I slept poorly on the train, but we had reserved a cheap hotel room near the station where we could rest and recuperate. Kyiv was still warm, with temperatures reaching the upper 70s by the early afternoon. At noon we met with Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, an American spokesman for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Sarah has achieved a certain degree of notoriety among Russians and other critics of Ukraine for her caustic analysis of the military and political situations. Most recently, she’s come under investigation from no less authority on integrity and dignity than Ohio’s own Senator J.D. Vance. Sarah discussed her perspective on the political and military situations in Ukraine, as well as the politics of Ukraine in the United States. Overall the take was altogether optimistic.
A couple hours later we met with an anti-corruption activist who worked us through the various anti-corruption efforts currently underway in Ukraine. She noted that Ukraine remains a deeply corrupt country, but that its reputation for corruption has persisted despite significant progress in some areas. I asked her about Russia’s role in this corrupt culture and she argued that Russia has intentionally pursued a policy of “strategic corruption” designed to undercut confidence in Ukrainian state institutions since at least the early 2000s. There’s a broader lesson here, I think about the connection between Russia’s relationship with Ukraine and the corruption that remains endemic to Ukrainian society. Ukraine is not accidentally corrupt; corruption has been and will continue to be one of Russia’s core strategies for managing its near abroad. The compromise of Ukrainian governance and civil society is in essence a strategy of control, giving Russia influence within Ukraine and a lever for separating Ukraine from Europe and the United States. This is not to say that corruption doesn’t exist or that it’s irrelevant (Ukrainians themselves are quite aware of the danger posed) but that concern ought to be framed in the proper context of Ukraine’s relationship with Russia. This is important, because it runs counter to the notion that Russia decided that it needed to invade Ukraine (in 2014 and again in 2022) out of concern about NATO rather than out of an interest in controlling Ukrainian politics. It also suggests that Russia has no interest whatsoever in an “Austria” arrangement by which Ukraine would maintain democratic institutions but remain outside of NATO and give up the greater portion of its armed forces.
Given that we had just returned from Odesa I asked her about corruption in that city specifically. She argued that Odesa was regarded by most Ukrainians as the most corrupt city in the country, and that this largely stemmed from its status as a major port. She further argued that Russia had made special efforts to undermine Ukrainian state governance in the region following 2014 and again in 2022, but that distance (and in 2022 a vigorous military defense) had prevented Odesa from falling to the same fate as Donetsk and Luhansk. Everyone seems to agree that the war itself had a dramatic negative impact on organized crime in Odesa; we’re not at an “everything is okay” moment with respect to the city but as with much of the rest of Ukraine the war has provided clarifying purpose and the opportunity to build non-corrupt state institutions.
After a final fabulous dinner at a Kyivan restaurant along the waterfront, we boarded our evening train for Warsaw. The trip would be slightly more comfortable and slightly shorter than the way in. All told, we spent five of the ten days of the trip sleeping in a vehicle; one night on a plane, four nights on trains.