The Free Press
ODESA — The Bristol Hotel’s salmon-pink facade is boarded up; its walls are mottled with soot and shattered glass. Its style is now Baroque Revival meets ballistic missile—a frieze cast from Russian violence.
This building in central Odesa holds fond memories for me. I’ve stayed here several times while covering the war over the last three years. Its paneled walls, patterned floors, and velvet curtains always remind me of the anachronistic fussiness of a tiered wedding cake. In the near darkness of a blackout or air raid its high-ceilinged restaurant has an almost Gothic feel. Miss Havisham would have felt at home here. It is a place where time seems to move slowly or not at all.
But time caught up with the Bristol when Moscow hit it on January 31, in a missile strike that injured seven people. There are no military targets in Odesa’s historic city center. The closest is the port, a few kilometers away. Moscow claimed Ukrainian spy chief Kyrylo Budanov was in the bunker of hotel. In truth, the Russians simply wanted to terrorize the people here.
The Bristol is not only Odesa’s most famous hotel, it is a cultural landmark. Russian Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin and Sister Carrie author Theodore Dreiser were among the intellectuals who dined in its restaurant, which stood for around 126 years until it was destroyed last month. I returned to Odesa two weeks later and surveyed the Bristol’s blown-out windows and shattered marble from just across the road on Italiiska (Italian) Street. This is Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine in microcosm: a war not just on the Ukrainian people but on civilization too.
My arrival in Odesa coincided with a rhetorical onslaught from President Donald Trump, who announced that he and Putin would be meeting to discuss an end to the war without any Ukrainians in the room. (Though he did later say that he would include them at some point.) He also said, parroting the Kremlin’s lies, that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was prompted by Kyiv’s ambitions to join NATO, and announced that he now wanted Moscow back in the Group of Seven (G7). Trump also demanded that Ukraine give the United States 50 percent of its rare earth minerals—materials essential for mobile phones, electric vehicles, missile guidance systems, and more—in return for the U.S. support it had received up to now.
Trump has obviously never liked Ukraine. Some say it’s because his first impeachment stemmed from allegations that he broke the law in July 2019 by pressuring Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up damaging information on Joe Biden. He also clearly admires Putin’s ability to stay in power indefinitely and do pretty much whatever he likes. But before the last couple of weeks, it wasn’t clear what action he would take once back in office. Not least because during his first term he was relatively supportive of Kyiv, green-lighting the delivery of U.S. Javelin anti-tank missiles that would prove so vital in repelling the Russians when they launched their full-scale invasion three years ago.
The day after I arrived last week, I took a walk through Odesa’s central streets again. The ice was thick and, in places, black. You walk with trepidation in Ukraine’s winters. Around me, I saw scores of people, hunched over in thick clothes. Each night of my stay, air raid sirens pierced through the silence as the Russians launched yet more drones and missiles at the city. Odesans get no respite these days.
That evening I caught up with a longstanding soldier friend I'll call Igor. I met Igor years ago on the eastern front, and we have kept in touch ever since. Like many Ukrainians I’ve met on the war’s various fronts, he’s been fighting Russia his entire adult life. He was morose.
“Me and the boys cannot understand it,” he told me gloomily. “After everything, why is the United States doing this? Don’t they realize that we are fighting for the West? Putin hates the West and above all, he hates America, which leads the West. Putin thinks that to defeat us is to defeat America. Why doesn’t Trump understand this?”
I asked him how Trump’s recent words have affected the morale of those who, like him, are fighting the Russians every day. “We are tired,” he admitted. “We have all lost friends; some have lost family. We want an end to the war. But not through total surrender to Russia. Not like this. Not after all the blood we paid.”
Ukrainians want the war to end. A Gallup poll conducted in August and October 2024 found that an average of 52 percent would like to see their country negotiate an end to the fighting as soon as possible. But not at any cost. Polling commissioned in the wake of Trump’s recent comments shows that 91 percent of Ukrainians are against talks without Ukraine’s participation.
The country wants peace—but with honor.
What makes the sense of betrayal worse is that many Ukrainians believed (and some still believe) in Trump. There is a constituency in Ukraine—especially (and extraordinarily) in the territories occupied by Russia—who, far from seeing Trump as soft on Putin, view him as a tough negotiator who they hoped would force the Kremlin into painful concessions. At the end of last year, two political cartoons circulated on Ukrainian Telegram channels: one showing Trump intimidating Putin at the negotiating table, another showing a desperate Putin straddling Ukraine and Syria—a clear reference to the setbacks he has suffered following Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk in Russia and the fall of Moscow client Bashar al-Assad. The message was clear: Putin is weak, Trump is strong, and the great dealmaker will use that strength to make peace.
Now though, with Trump seemingly determined to confirm the most feverish Democratic conspiracy theories about him, another emotion has begun to emerge on the ground: resolve. In a café just off Odesa’s Hretska Ploshcha (Greek Square), I drank a cappuccino that would not have looked out of place in Williamsburg, and called Yuri, another soldier friend of mine. The connection wasn’t great, as he was near the front, and time was short. But he was clear. “We will fight as long as it takes to stop Russia from swallowing Ukraine,” he said.
A day after I left Odesa, Trump duly came out and called Zelensky “a dictator” after Ukraine’s leader had accused him of living in a “disinformation space.” He then added that Ukraine, not Russia, had started the war. It was this conflict’s most grotesque inversion of reality since Putin claimed that Ukraine, with its Jewish president, was run by a neo-Nazi regime.
By now many of the soldiers fighting on the front were enraged. My friend Vitaliy has been fighting in the Russian region of Kursk since the Ukrainians invaded it in August of last year. “I’m disappointed in the U.S,” he told me. “I always saw the U.S. as a symbol of stable democracy. Now, I see it as a threat to the free world. The way they are pressuring Ukraine is horrifying. I never thought something like this could happen.
“We used to wear American flag patches on our body armor as a symbol of the land of freedom. Now, we’ve taken them off.”
David Patrikarakos is a British war correspondent and the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.