Kyiv has great resonance in both Ukrainian and Russian culture, as the capital of medieval Rus, a city still adorned with Byzantine frescoes and mosaics in the style of Constantinople, or, as it came to be known, Tsargrad, “the city of the emperor”. These links to Byzantium were sundered in the thirteenth century by the Mongol conquests in Eurasia. Kyiv took centuries to recover from Mongol rule. Power shifted north-eastwards to new centres, notably Moscow. 

But we have to ask whether even now, in the midst of the Ukrainian war, Kyiv is the prime target of Russian imperial ambitions.

The tsars yearned for access to the sea. One possibility was the Baltic, where Peter the Great built St Petersburg at the start of the eighteenth century. A more lucrative possibility was the Black Sea, open all year, through which Ukrainian grain had been flowing for centuries. At the end of the eighteenth century Catherine the Great seized on the opportunity created by victory over the Turks to found Odessa, supposedly named after the great traveller Odysseus, while its hinterland was given the name Novorossiya, “New Russia”. Even at the start of the twentieth century the tsars had not forgotten Tsargrad. 

The idea of a Russian conquest of Istanbul and the return of Constantinople to Orthodox Christian rule was irresistible; but control of the straits leading from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean was also a longstanding ambition.

Odessa was founded on the model the Austrian rulers had recently applied to Trieste: it was to be open to people of all ethnicities and religions. Wealthy Greek shipowners gathered there and became even wealthier exporting Ukraine’s wheat. Its population was a mix of all the peoples of eastern Europe. The large Jewish population of Odessa was sometimes the target of murderous pogroms, but it was also a place where an increasingly secular Jewish culture flourished. Odessa’s most famous writer was Pushkin. The city was described as “Little Paris”. Handsome palaces and villas were erected, though there was a wide gap between the wealthy elite and an impoverished proletariat. 

Odessa remains the gateway to the massive agricultural resources of Ukraine, but its strategic significance for Putin goes far beyond that. It is also the gateway to south-eastern Europe. Odessa lies close to the breakaway territory of Transnistria, a sliver of Moldova that is already patrolled by Russian “peace-keepers”. Moldova is not a member of Nato nor of the EU, but it is another former Soviet republic, having been sliced off Romania in 1940 following the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Complete control of the Ukrainian shoreline, including Odessa as well as Mariupol, would be a disaster for Ukraine and would enable Russian naval power to dominate the Black Sea, threatening not just Moldova but Georgia. Even though Russian ambitions no longer extend to Istanbul, it is no surprise that President Erdogan, who controls the route into the Mediterranean, seeks to mediate between Ukraine and Russia. 

There are echoes here of the Crimean War, which broke out in 1854, with Britain, France and Turkey ranged against the Russian Empire. One of the issues that sparked the war was Russia’s occupation of Moldova and the Danube delta. Putin has not yet focussed on Odessa, but if he finds its strategic position irresistible, history may begin to repeat itself.

David Abulafia is a professor of history at the University of Cambridge