The Unholy and Not Silent Nights. The Russian Terror Offensive on Odesa

Cruise and ballistic missiles, reconnaissance and attack drones—together, separately, and in combination—have been terrorising Odesa. What makes it so vulnerable but also so resilient at the same time?

The escalation began in mid-December, marking (so far) the largest campaign against critical infrastructure in Odesa Oblast since the start of the full-scale invasion. First, ballistic missiles—against which the city is essentially defenceless—hit the port complex. The combined missile and drone attack—dubbed a ‘megastrike’—left over 616 000 (out of roughly 1 million) households without electricity, heating, and water; to say nothing of the countless housing destroyed and people injured. The devastation was so heavy that emergency generators failed to cope.

The megastrike triggered a declaration of ‘state-level emergency’, allowing for the redirection of reserve funds to buy fuel, among other measures. Authorities set up water distribution stations and opened over 400 ‘points of invincibility’. The latter are community centres providing shelter and basic supplies: from power, hot meals, and first aid to Wi-Fi. An invention of the first year of the Big War, they prevented a humanitarian collapse.

Systemic attacks, however, have continued into a second, then third, fourth, and fifth week. In addition to port and energy infrastructure, logistical and transport hubs connecting the south of Odesa Oblast, known as Bessarabia, to the regional capital, as well as Ukraine to its southwestern neighbours, were selected for the primary targets.

The civilian population, without basic services for days, were the collateral damage in Russia’s new campaign of terror. Methodical strikes occurred on a nearly daily basis. In Odesa, tens of thousands celebrated Christmas and Hannukkah, the festival of lights, in the dark. On Christmas Eve, Russia attacked again, taking one life.

Minutes before the clocks struck midnight on 31 December, Russian drones struck Odesa’s energy infrastructure. The attacks persisted into the first hours of the new year, sending three children to the hospital. On New Year’s, the city remained without power. Some of its residents lost their homes.

Inherent Constraints

What makes Odesa, a strategic location on the Black Sea, so vulnerable? The first challenge is its physical geography. Stretched along the coastline, the region is a dead end on Ukraine’s energy map, with no local generation, which makes it easier to cut this area off from (as well as reconnect to) the rest of the country.

A restart will take a month in the best-case scenario, i.e., absent new strikes, whereas full reconstruction will need a year or two. In anticipation of Russia’s attempts to destabilise the energy sector during the winter season, 206 brigades were on duty round-the-clock, with over 2 000 workers to be mobilised for emergency repairs; additionally, fuel and spare parts had been stockpiled. Yet, this time, they proved insufficient, due to the scale and frequency of the attacks, as well as the wear and tear of the equipment under a four-year stress test. One must remember that even before these city-wide emergency outages, scheduled phased blackouts were in place as the local generation could only cover up to a third of the needs.

Second, administrative deficiencies. Ahead of the winter season, the local officials were overly optimistic, advertising new ‘cogeneration capacities’, a project that ultimately failed but had incurred millions in debt for the municipal budget; some of the public figures have since left office. Worth noting is that these are local affairs, not connected to the nation’s main corruption scandal in the energy sector.

Third, the enemy’s advances. Russia’s long-range strike drones have been upgraded to carry missiles and cluster munitions. The enemy has improved its tactics, in addition to enjoying supremacy in numbers. Russian drones are now being launched from multiple directions, day and night, to overwhelm the air defence systems, and have learned to evade interceptors. Whereas Ukraine has been exhausting air defence munitions and bleeding manpower that is also needed to staff mobile air defence units in the rear. With other expensive assets in short supply, Ukrainian forces in Odesa pioneered the adaptation of the vintage Yak-52 aircraft—known as an ‘escadrille’—to shoot down the drones. Not designed for warfare, these training planes have been equipped with machine guns to protect the city skies, but lack protection for the crew.

Hit Where It Hurts the Most

This brings us to the value Russia sees in exploiting these vulnerabilities. Some point to changes in the Russian strategy: to redirect resources towards Odesa to trigger a total collapse in supplies beyond energy.

Ports in the greater Odesa area are the only maritime links available to Ukraine since the full-scale invasion. It bears reminding that their operation has been made possible due to diplomatic efforts by Kyiv’s international partners, as well as Ukraine’s own successful naval campaign in the Black Sea. A nation without a conventional navy has denied free rein to the Russians at sea—and embarrassed the Kremlin. This economic lifeline has routinely come under fire. Synchronised attacks on deep-sea routes and the alternative logistics by land and river waters affect agricultural exports and fuel imports.

After the initial megastrike, the main port of Odesa, just like the rest of the city, had no power for days, running solely on generators, which created bottlenecks for cargo trains. Russia, meanwhile, has only intensified its campaign, damaging commercial vessels docked in the harbour. Despite the best efforts to redirect shipments by road and rail, the Ukrainian Farmers’ Union sounded the alarm on defaults on contracts.

It is not only Ukraine that bears the brunt. Russian drones hit two vessels on their way to be loaded with wheat, threatening global food security, Ukraine’s military said. Frequent drone raids are a challenge beyond Ukraine’s borders: the attack on the port facilities on the Danube forced Romania to scramble its jets. The environment was another collateral: the city beaches were covered with oil slicks—a deadly threat to birds and marine life.

Since 2022, transport hubs on the border, in particular the riverports in the south of Odesa Oblast, have been developed to compensate for the reduced capacity. This is where Russia focused on 18 December, zooming in on the Odesa-Reni Highway that travels to Moldova and Romania, halting truck traffic. In a domino effect, two border crossing points shut down. The enemy carried out about 20 strikes on a bridge across the Dniester River in the village of Mayaky, disabling a critical piece of infrastructure that serves as an essential artery for goods to the European markets as well as supplies to Ukraine. (The other bridge, once the primary rail link over the Dniester Estuary, had been destroyed by a series of Russian strikes back in the spring of 2022.) In line with contingency plans to quickly resume transit, a floating bridge was assembled, allowing small vehicles to cross. Opinions on whether these recent strikes on the bridge constituted a serious attempt to isolate Bessarabia from the rest of the country, however, diverged. Russia, meanwhile, has continued the barrage of drones and missiles to cripple the region’s port infrastructure into the new year, with another deadly strike in week five of the campaign.

Physical Realm

Whenever Russia escalates with conventional forces, it always accompanies with hybrid and information operations. This time was no exception. To mount political pressure on Kyiv, Moscow targets the civilian population: first, by inflicting maximum suffering—to the point of humanitarian disaster—and then by exploiting and amplifying dissatisfaction with the government or local authorities. In it, Russians have made some progress. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has acknowledged that Ukraine has, indeed, been pushed to the verge of a catastrophe in the energy and humanitarian spheres. To this end, too, cluster munition is used to kill and injure as many people as possible, often first responders, usually striking the same location twice—a terrorist tactic.

In the fourth year of the full-scale war, the Russian special services are still able to recruit Odesa residents to assist them at all stages: from intelligence collection to execution. Their primary mission is to help direct Russian strikes as well as to locate and monitor Ukraine’s air defence positions. In recent months alone, the State Security Service (SBU) detained a 50-year-old man suspected of spying on the Ukrainian troops—mobile fire groups, in particular—and military activity along the Odesa coastline. A 39-year-old woman was arrested, and a 49-year-old engineer was convicted on the same charges. Both were selected by the FSB because of their pro-Russian social media posts and handled by the curators via Telegram messenger. They were tasked with taking photos of critical facilities and marking the coordinates for potential targets on Google maps.

Next, in addition to espionage activities, the locals are being cultivated for more complicated sabotage and diversion operations. Instructed by the FSB, a retired seafarer was planting home-made explosive devices (reinforced with mental bolts and detonated remotely with a mobile phone), a task he received after having completed a series of tests—reporting on the damage following Russian attacks. Finally, eight men, aged between 19 and 73 years old, were arrested for acts of sabotage and diversion at the railway tracks; in this case, a stash with explosives had already been prepared for them.

Information Realm

In some sense, if one looks at the execution, information attacks resemble those carried out by drones and missiles. For an influence campaign, the Russian propagandists first design ‘packages’ of narratives and messages to then launch them in combination and in synchrony with physical attacks.

Some—often narratives—have a specific strategic target, such as trust in authorities, the central government in particular. The Kremlin believes it can be undermined by playing on the local-regional-national division. One narrative here alleges that ‘Odesa and its population are not important enough for Kyiv, and as such are less protected than the nation’s capital.’

As further evidence of coordination, in mid-December, reports started spreading that the so-called authorities of the occupied Transnistria region of Moldova had announced ‘combat readiness’ and ‘mobilisation’ and appealed to the Kremlin to reinforce its presence by sending additional troops. Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) stated that Russia had dispatched special services agents to conduct sabotage actions. The idea behind it was likely to coerce Ukraine to pull some of its forces securing the east and the north towards the southwestern border to prevent a speculated ‘incursion’. Likewise, Russians want to stretch Ukraine’s air defence resources thin by forcing it to relocate some systems to Odesa, thus the frontline areas for Russian winter offensives.

Others—usually messages, sophisticated and not—are launched as a swarm of drones and are meant to wreak more havoc, especially in the aftermath of a major attack, such as the ‘megastrike’ in December. Fakes about the evacuation of Odesa were being injected into the information space. The Kremlin’s propagandists have widely adopted micro-targeting techniques on social media: posing as vigilant neighbours, its agents infiltrate community chats on Telegram to give the clout of trustworthiness to their fearmongering. Meanwhile, developments in AI have enabled bots to write messages that would be indistinguishable from authentic comments, scale up at a low cost, and spray them over multiple channels. As with the cheap but just as dangerous drones, there are simply too many of them to track, so some are bound to penetrate the defences.

Russian campaigns co-occurring in physical and information space present an extra challenge to strategic communication. Authorities have to manage a humanitarian crisis (i.e., keep the public informed about the search and rescue operations, aid available, etc.) while simultaneously responding to and countering disinformation. And as the case of Odesa shows, all of it has to be done in an environment where the population’s access to information has been severely limited by power outages.

Resilience

One shall remember that Russia can only exaggerate the existing (and oftentimes legitimate) sentiments. An example of such grievances is idleness and a botched preparation process: ahead of this winter’s campaign, nearly a third of Ukrainians (29%) were inclined to blame the national authorities for the blackouts.

When air raid alarms go off nonstop, with the warning in place for hours, it cannot help but take a toll on public health. Under such a mental and physical strain, the atmosphere at the points of invincibility has become less amicable and conflicts more common, local journalists admit. Deprived of basic amenities for days on end, some took to the streets and blocked the road, resulting in skirmishes with drivers.

For now, the only way Russians can reach Odesa is by terror. The best way to resist it is through cooperation within the country as well as with neighbours and partners. As the megastrike parked the electric transport, municipalities from western Ukraine dispatched some of their bus fleet to the rescue.

After the bridge in Mayaky had been hit, Moldova and Ukraine swiftly agreed on opening alternative transit routes and expanding the capacity of the existing ones. To mitigate the passenger transit disruption, for the first time since 2022, Chisinau and Odesa restarted a train connection.

The European Commission—through the coordinated efforts of Lithuania, Poland, and Romania—has conducted its “most demanding logistical operation to date,” delivering a full set of thermal power plant equipment, which will help restore essential generation capacity and ensure Ukraine’s energy resilience. Continued assistance to the energy sector, especially in the form of spare parts for repairs and mobile energy generation systems, is what the region will need most in the near term.

Efficient response also requires proactive decisions and ad hoc solutions from the otherwise slow-moving state bureaucratic apparatus: as one such example, the government has fast-tracked the customs procedures. It will help unclog the ports, simplify designing new logistical routes, and thus improve security for the cargo crews.

Measures to make life in wartime a little more tolerable do not end there. Ukraine has recently reformed its air raid alert system so that only the areas under direct threat will be notified. For Odesa, its exhausted residents and businesses, it is a huge relief: the city stands in the way of nearly every attack targeting the heartland of Ukraine from the Black Sea and the occupied Crimean peninsula.

In the meantime, theatres, museums, and art galleries tried their best to continue offering a mental retreat to children and adults alike amid the blackouts, and even managed to have a premiere night, signifying a rebirth and resilience of modern Ukrainian culture that defies war. Neither did the Russian terror campaign stop the first Christmas Carol parade in Odesa.

And yet, no matter how resilient the people or how secure the infrastructure, nothing can “survive five ballistic missiles,” to paraphrase the Kharkiv mayor. With the support of European partners, two more Patriot systems will soon guard Ukraine’s cities. A low casualty count in Odesa, despite the scale of the weeks-long campaign, proves the efficiency of air defences and defenders. Absent reinforcements in staff and equipment, however, recent strikes on Kharkiv and Kyiv show how much worse it can get in the embattled south, the city of Odesa, and its strategic port infrastructure.

Apropos

Wide-scale disruption of public services can happen anywhere, as the recent power outage in Berlin epitomises. As the same case of Berlin—where Ukrainian refugees opened a point of invincibility—illustrates, similar lessons and measures apply.

Even when a result of unattributed, below-the-threshold cyber-attacks, technological failures, or natural disasters, malign actors—most likely Russian—may abuse such events for information influence. Therefore, authorities should be prepared: build up trust and resilience in society; beware of vulnerabilities and narratives the Kremlin, even when not a culprit, will try to exploit; and prebunk disinformation when possible.