Odesa
Catherine the Great's purpose-built grain port on the Black Sea—Odesa handles 60% of Ukraine's maritime trade, and its 2022 blockade proved one port's closure can spike global food prices overnight.
Catherine the Great founded Odesa in 1794 for one reason: Russia needed a warm-water port on the Black Sea. The site was a former Ottoman fortress, and Catherine's architects designed the city from scratch as a trade gateway—broad boulevards, a famous staircase descending to the harbor, and free-port status that made it the Russian Empire's most cosmopolitan city. Greeks, Italians, Jews, and Turks traded grain alongside Russians and Ukrainians, creating the kind of polyglot commercial culture that emerges wherever trade routes converge.
Grain made Odesa rich. By the mid-19th century, it was the Russian Empire's fourth-largest city and its primary grain export terminal—Ukrainian black earth fertility converted into shipping revenue. The Potemkin Stairs, immortalized in Eisenstein's 1925 film, connected the commercial port to the city above, a physical metaphor for Odesa's role as intermediary between continental production and global markets. That middleman function persisted through Soviet industrialization, which added shipbuilding and machine manufacturing to the port economy.
Ukrainian independence in 1991 initially diminished Odesa's strategic importance, but geography reasserted itself. The city remains Ukraine's largest port, handling roughly 60% of the country's maritime trade. When Russia's 2022 invasion blockaded Black Sea shipping, global grain prices spiked—demonstrating how one port's closure can cascade through international food systems like removing a keystone from an arch. The UN-brokered grain corridor of 2022-2023 treated Odesa as exactly what it has always been: a bottleneck through which continental agricultural output must pass.
Odesa's survival strategy has always been the same: make yourself indispensable to whoever controls the hinterland. Greek traders, Ottoman garrisons, Russian tsars, Soviet planners, and Ukrainian governments have all needed what Odesa provides—a warm-water interface between land and sea. That geographic logic protects the city even when politics threatens to destroy it.