It took only a few weeks for a new and brutal reality to take hold in Ukraine: there is no need to conquer the whole of Ukraine’s Black Sea coastline in order to turn the country into the equivalent of a landlocked state. It is enough to deny access to it. That is precisely what Russia has been doing since July 22, effectively closing the Odessa port complex to all commercial traffic through air and missile strikes — without a single Russian soldier having to set foot there.
A Closing Window
For nearly four years, Odessa had remained relatively spared. The grain deal negotiated under the auspices of Turkey and the United Nations, wrung out under pressure from the Global South, had allowed the port to continue handling around 90% of Ukraine’s agricultural exports — much to the displeasure of Kremlin hardliners, who accused Vladimir Putin of preferring to spare his Global South partners rather than militarily strangling Kyiv.
Three developments combined to tip this balance. First, the evident failure of the Western strategy aimed at turning Russia into an international pariah. This losing bet by the Biden administration only pushed Russia to tighten its ties with the Global South. Second, the depletion of Ukrainian air-defense interceptor stocks, which left Odessa largely defenseless against Russian ballistic missiles. Finally — and this is undoubtedly the most ironic factor — the “40-day campaign” launched by Kyiv in late June, consisting of drone strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and shipping in the Sea of Azov. Volodymyr Zelensky presented it as a way to “compel the aggressor to end the war”; Donald Trump, more bluntly, called it “an escalation we hope will lead to peace.” In practice, this escalation mainly handed the Kremlin an argument for denouncing the grain deal concluded in 2022. Moscow can now argue to its Global South allies that it was Kyiv that triggered the new cycle of attacks on maritime traffic and ports.
An Economic Hemorrhage and a Strategic Trap
The immediate effects are already dramatic: Ukraine’s agricultural exports, the backbone of the country’s economy, could fall by half in the coming months, for lack of land, rail, or river alternatives capable of handling the lost volume. While European aid will probably be able to cushion the shock in the short term, it is over the long term that the real stakes of Odessa’s lockdown emerge.
European capitals, through the voice of Ursula von der Leyen, want to believe that, absent a negotiated compromise with Moscow, Ukraine could become a “steel porcupine”: a state armed and fortified enough to turn the hot war into a stable, frozen conflict, without ever having to cede territory or accept limits on its military capabilities — two points Moscow considers non-negotiable for concluding peace. Their hope is that Ukraine will become the Eastern European equivalent of Israel, a “Major Non-NATO Ally” capable of carrying real military weight.
The lockdown of Odessa shows that this hope rests on an illusion. If Russia can deprive Ukraine of its ports through air power alone, it can just as easily prevent its reconstruction. No construction firm will risk rebuilding bridges, roads, factories, or port infrastructure under the threat of Russian strikes capable of destroying them within hours. No investor will risk hundreds of billions of dollars under these conditions. And without economic reconstruction, without jobs, without restored stability, the majority of the millions of Ukrainian refugees — who left for Europe, but also, in many cases, for Russia — will never return.
The Demographic Crisis Everyone Pretends to Ignore
Beyond the losses on the battlefield — which, in hindsight, will likely turn out to have been understated — the exodus caused by the war has accelerated the collapse of Ukraine’s demographics. From a population of around 52 million at the fall of the USSR, Ukraine today numbers, by the own admission of its Minister of Social Policy, only between 22 and 25 million inhabitants — nearly half of them retirees. Some projections suggest that the working-age population could still lose a further third of its size by 2040, and the number of children could fall to half of pre-war levels.
Hence a question too uncomfortable to be asked: how could an aging, declining population, deprived of a solid economic base, serve as a bulwark against a nuclear power six to seven times more populous?
What Awaits Ukraine
The alternative to an uncomfortable territorial and military compromise with Moscow is therefore not the “steel porcupine” so vaunted by Ursula von der Leyen and the hardliners — Kaja Kallas, Mark Rutte, Donald Tusk, Radosław Sikorski, Andy Burnham, Friedrich Merz, or Emmanuel Macron. It is a rump state — dysfunctional, bled dry, and corrupt. Without peace, however humiliating it may be, Ukraine will never be rebuilt, and it will never escape its dependence on its Western backers. For Europe, the situation will hardly be more enviable: open-ended financial support, a refugee question that has become structural rather than transitional, a costly arms race, and the impossibility of restoring the energy ties with Russia on which its prosperity was nonetheless built. Those leading us into this impasse will not be the ones to write history — and when the dust has settled and this period is studied more objectively, their responsibility will weigh heavily.