In the spring of 2014, as the war in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region was breaking out, deadly clashes wracked the elegant port city of Odessa. On May 2nd pro-Russian separatists shot at pro-Ukrainian demonstrators from behind police lines. The riot ended in a fire that killed 46 separatists. The city has been largely quiet ever since. Yet over the past few months Odessa, now governed by Mikheil Saakashvili, a former president of Georgia, has become a battleground in a less visible sort of war. This pits the corrupt post-Soviet system that has ruled Ukraine for nearly a quarter of a century against the law-based state that was promised by the Maidan revolution in Kiev nearly two years ago.
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