The tourist cafes are behind barricades. The grand opera house is surrounded by a wall of sandbags. Tank traps block the approaches to the legendary Potemkin steps. Nobody in Odesa can quite believe that Vladimir Putin would launch an assault on this city, a place bound to Russia by family, literary and cultural ties, a place of almost mythical resonance for many Russians.
But then, Putin’s armed forces have done lots of things in recent days that seemed unthinkable just two weeks ago.
