Under-fire Odesa sets aside its Russian heritage

In the courtyard of Odesa's Fine Arts museum, a police officer unlocked a large, grey container and pulled back the doors to reveal Catherine the Great. She was laid out flat on a wooden tray, one arm outstretched and the other at her side, holding a scroll ordering the construction of Odesa.

- Shaun Walker

The Russian empress, or rather her bronze likeness, used to stand proudly on a pedestal in the heart of the city that she founded in the late 18th century. Now she is here, locked in a box away from public view.

The removal of Catherine, unthinkable before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine last year, is a reflection of the mood in a city that is rapidly losing all sentimentality about its Russian-linked past as it comes under sustained fire from Russian missiles.

Odesa's mayor, Gennadiy Trukhanov, was once strongly in favour of keeping Catherine in place, but changed his mind last year amid public pressure and agreed to her removal.

"How could I explain to parents who have lost their children or to children who have lost their parents why there is a Russian empress standing in the middle of our city?" Trukhanov asked, in an interview at the city administration building.

Catherine's removal is just one part of a programme of "de-Russification" that is going on all over Ukraine. It has a particular hue in Odesa, where it is not only the figure of Catherine that binds the historical and cultural landscape to Moscow. Many of the great Russian-language writers were from Odesa or spent time there, its residents largely speak Russian and its Transfiguration Cathedral was consecrated by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in 2010.

But now, President Vladimir Putin is swiftly accomplishing something that 30 years of Ukrainian independence had struggled to do: he is turning Odesa into a proudly Ukrainian city.