ODESSA, Ukraine — Most traffic leaving the “Pearl of the Black Sea” heads for points north or west toward Lviv, Poland, or Moldova, though just a few hours’ drive to the east lies Mykolaiv, the only major city between Odessa and the front line.

Russian cruise missiles have struck targets in Mykolaiv sporadically over the past three weeks. It is unclear if the strikes portend a larger Russian offensive or if they are to sow panic in a city within range of the Russian war machine.

Either way, Mykolaiv is a city of strategic importance — one ready to repulse the Russian invasion force. And so I, and a pair of photographers, are determined to visit, which is why, at 6:25 a.m., I am standing outside my accommodation.

A gray Subaru pulls up to the curb. Our Odessan driver, Mikhail, turns out to have been a maritime lawyer. He worked through disputes between shipping firms and port authorities in the English language.

Today the port is at a standstill. Russian warships blockade Odessa and prevent cargo ships from leaving the port. Ukrainian naval mines keep the Russian ships at sea and away from the harbor.

Out of work, middle-aged Mikhail works as a fixer-for-hire, driving journalists and photographers toward Ukraine’s shifting front lines.

“Where’re you from?” he asks me.

“California,” I answer.

Mikhail has been to Los Angeles with his family and prefers the city’s dry, desert heat to southern Ukraine’s muggy summers. I toss my backpack in the trunk and cinch my ballistic vest tightly around my ribs. Though we travel to Mykolaiv by car, our soft-skinned Subaru offers no protection from errant bullets or shrapnel.

The photographers are also strapped into their vests, “PRESS” emblazoned in bold capital letters across their chests and backs. Mikhail takes a last, deep pull from a cigarette, and we pull away from the curb.

There is hardly a car on the road this early in the morning, though there won’t be much traffic later in the day either. Mikhail’s wife, toddler son, and 13-year-old daughter left Odessa for Poland, though he is bound by Ukraine’s martial law, which prevents all men between 18 to 60 — i.e., the national militia — from leaving the country.

There are a few vehicle checkpoints in the city, but they multiply in Odessa’s industrial outskirts. Steel tank traps painted in high-visibility yellow, spools of razor wire, and sandbagged fighting positions mark Ukrainian security points.

Mikhail tells us to have our passports and press accreditations at the ready — and to keep our cellphones in our pocket and leave cameras on the seat or car floor. Here the checkpoints are manned chiefly by the Territorial Defense Forces, the Ukrainian army’s all-volunteer reserve force. Although the Ukrainian army supplies the Territorial Defense with weapons, uniforms, and ammunition, they differentiate themselves from the military with blue armbands.

A blue-banded checkpoint guard stops us, eyeballing our car. Through a fog of early-morning sleepiness, I realize that we are four military-age males — three of us wearing ballistic vests — with a trunk full of backpacks, batteries, and recording equipment.

“Good morning,” Mikhail says to the guard through the window, pointing a thumb at the three of us. “Press,” he explains, “three journalists, American, Hungarian, and English.”

The guard gives our outstretched passports a perfunctory glance, waving us through, and we snake through the barriers across the road without any problems.

The road to Mykolaiv is just 85 miles. The going, though, is slow. At least a dozen checkpoints and improvised blockhouses interrupt what was in peacetime a quick ride.

Driving northeast, we hug the coastline and see the sea from the two-lane highway. Civilian fuel tankers heading in the same direction dwarf our gray hatchback.

We cross a series of ponds and lakes en route to Mykolaiv — all saltwater, Mikhail explains. We ford the marshy areas on raised sections of road that look over green patches of cattails and swamp grass. 

We are stuck behind the convoy of fuel tankers and slowly grind to a crawl, suspended on a causeway over one of the salt ponds. Creeping along, we can’t see what the hold-up is.

The truck ahead of us scoots into the opposite lane, skirting a crater gouged into the black asphalt by some projectile.

It is the first sober indication on this trip of the violence of the war, and it puts a damper on our light-hearted conversation. We drive on in silence.

En route to Mykolaiv, we pass the fuel convoy on a slightly downhill stretch of straight road and cruise at a good clip. We pass another mixed convoy of camouflaged military fuel tankers and five-ton armored personnel carriers. They belch clouds of smoke on the uphill and fill the Subaru with the acrid smell of burnt diesel.

The closer we are to Mykolaiv, the more we’re looked at suspiciously at checkpoints. Although we have national, Ukraine-wide press accreditation, visiting Mykolaiv is only possible with an additional local accreditation.

The Mykolaiv regional military administration’s press service vets applications and is known for scrutinizing applicants with extreme suspicion. The administration has a long list of things forbidden to photograph or describe — essentially anything of military significance.

The gravity of the situation increases with our proximity to Mykolaiv, and is reflected in our fixer’s choice of words. Around Odessa, Mikhail bid the guards farewell with the polite but everyday Spasiba bolshoye — Thanks a lot. Nearer to our destination, the polite gives way to the serious: ‘pasiba udachi — Thanks, good luck.

At Mykolaiv’s outskirts, regional police in black uniforms with silver badges take over checkpoint guard duty from Territorial Defense guards.

A large checkpoint looms over the road ahead. Unlike the loose groupings of sand-filled tires and smattering of tank and vehicle traps, this police checkpoint just outside the city is a fortress.

Machine gun barrels peep at us through loops. A police officer approaches our car. His rifle is slung barrel-up over his shoulder, and he holds the butt back with his hand.

“Weapons?” he asks. “Drugs?” Mikhail responds with a flat “no,” but we’re waved off the road onto the shoulder and told to open the trunk.

Although we have the proper documentation, the tension in the air is palpable. Standing outside, another officer glances quickly through our things and peers at our papers. Finally, he nods at us politely, and his steely blue eyes crinkle into a smile.

“Welcome to Nikolayev,” he says in lightly accented English, using the Russian placename for the city rather than the Ukrainian Mykolaiv. 

We approach the southern Bug, Ukraine’s second-longest river. Just across the river on the right bank is our destination, the last city on the Bug. We cross a bridge spanning the river and enter Mykolaiv proper.

Our first stop in Mykolaiv is a five-story hotel recently bombed by Russians. An enormous bowl-shaped section is missing from the top three floors, and concrete rubble pours out of the hotel, clogging the main entrance.

An off-white air-conditioning unit clings to the side of the building, somehow hanging on by its electrical cord. The unit’s radiator fan spins eerily in the breeze.

The force of the explosion shattered the windows of nearby buildings, and broken glass litters the sidewalk. Bedding flaps listlessly from several windows.

The hotel is too damaged to repair, and once this war is over, it will be torn down. But, much to our surprise, Mikhail tells us that there were no casualties in the missile strike — the hotel was closed thanks to Covid.

We notice a flurry of activity a few blocks down the road — 1960s-era ambulances and fire trucks chug down the road, diesel engines roaring and their tinny sirens blaring. We pile into the car in pursuit.

En route, we get word from information online that Mykolaiv’s main administration building has been hit by a cruise missile, likely around the time we entered the city. Strangely we didn’t hear an explosion, and air alarm sirens didn’t go off.

As we walk down a side street toward the administration building, glass crunches underfoot. The force of the explosion has shattered many windows and set off a department store alarm.

Near a heavily sandbagged checkpoint, three blue-banded Territorial Defense Force reservists raise their hands and tell us we can’t approach the building.

They clutch AK-74s, propped against the magazines fastened to the front of their ballistic vests. They’re well-kitted with gloves and helmets and army-issue fatigues and boots. Several are mustachioed, though their upper lips are a youthful mix of both fuzz and bristle.

One of them stands apart from the rest with a dazed look in his eye. He has no rifle, no vest, and no helmet. Instead, he clutches a steaming paper cup of coffee up to his lips in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

He’s wearing olive-green pants and a jacket flecked across the chest and legs with a grayish-white powder. His coffee must be scalding, but he quaffs the drink in a few quick gulps. The dazed soldier takes a few deep drags from his cigarette, which quickly becomes a thin pencil of ash.

Mikhail talks to his comrades, who explain they’ve just pulled him out of the rubble that was once part of the administration building, waving us off. They walk behind their sandbagged checkpoint and end our brief interview.

Most major intersections are equipped with stacks of old tires and containers of gasoline or Molotov cocktails. If the Russians enter the city, the tires will be set ablaze, their thick black smoke used to obscure positions on the ground from Russian airplanes or drones.

Driving down Mykolaiv’s Central Avenue — formerly Lenin Avenue — we see signs of fighting during the invasion’s early days. A corner apartment building bears the signs of an indirect strike.

Its façade is pockmarked, and many windows facing the street are broken. Sheets of translucent plastic over empty window frames snap in the wind, showing which residents didn’t, or couldn’t, leave the building.

Tank tracks cover the boulevard’s grassy central strip, and oily charred patches show where Russian vehicles took hits and caught fire. Most of the trees that once grew there are cut down. They’re useful for both fortifications and fuel.

Mikhail gets a call from a friend who tells him that a missile struck a nearby workshop.

On a Central Avenue side street, we drive through a roundabout en route to the workshop. Mikhail carefully avoids what looks like a large missile buried in the asphalt. Its dull gray tail fins stick out of the ground, bent at odd angles. The missile’s engine nozzle lies on the road, partially flattened.

Only one soldier asks to see our extra Mykolaiv press accreditation. He’s guarding a checkpoint that straddles a railroad crossing. There, the Territorial Defense reservists repurposed three train wagons as a rolling roadblock.

The green wagons are emblazoned Беларуськалий in bright yellow — Belaruskali, one of Minsk’s most important state-owned companies and a top fertilizer exporter. The Russians have launched attacks on Ukraine from Belarus and seeing the repurposed Belarusian rolling stock is heartening.

Standing outside the workshop, we see a group of older men through a blue gate. Through our fixer, we ask them if we could see their property and talk about what happened. Though they are skeptical at first, they eventually acquiesce.

The property is a home appliance repair workshop, the chief engineer Yevgeny explains, declining to give his last name or age. They buy broken appliances and resell them, shipping throughout the region. A few days previously, a cluster munition struck one of their warehouses.

Yevgeny explains that the warehouse was their storage facility for rolls of saran wrap. The highly flammable material went up in flames almost instantly.

So intense was the heat that delivery vans parked next to the warehouse caught fire, though separated from the flames by a thick brick wall. The vans’ charred hulks are silver-gray. The fire vaporized everything flammable, and the window glass has melted into clear puddles on the chassis floor.

The missile strike also hit a nearby electrical substation, leaving the workshop without power. Yevgeny doesn’t know when they’ll get power again, though without vans to pick up and deliver appliances, it hardly matters.

The blaze also burned through an adjacent warehouse full of spare parts and stock. The men didn’t dare try to put out the blaze, fearing unexploded submunitions, and let the fire burn out.

Although an explosive ordnance disposal group from the army checked the property, we are told not to go inside the burned-out buildings. As we leave the workshop, a police officer across the street marks a spot in the grass with a small red flag, indicating a small submunition has been found. We pile back into the car.

The day’s sunny morning later gives way to clouds. Driving through a residential area, we spot a lone apartment unit that’s been hit, the side of the building above the unit charred black from flames.

We stop to take a few photographs, but an older man is suspicious and accuses us of being spotters for Russians. Mikhail explains that we have the necessary accreditation, though the older man doesn’t care to look over our documents and calls the police instead.

He explains on the telephone that there is a group claiming to be foreign journalists but that he can’t be sure. If we leave, it would confirm suspicions and could be dangerous. So we decide to wait.

We hear a low rumble of what sounds like rocket artillery. We are standing out in the open in a residential area and quickly look at each other. “It’s outgoing,” Mikhail reassures us. We hear what sounds like jet engines somewhere distant. A look at the map discloses that we are a mere 10 or 15 miles from the front.

The older man who called the police has no desire to chat, though he quickly becomes frustrated, perhaps realizing that he also has to wait for the police to arrive. He calls again and shouts at the phone but abruptly hangs up and quickly stomps off.

Mikhail laughs — he explains that the police probably told the man to stop bothering us and let us do our job.

We eat a quick sandwich lunch from the trunk of the car. A small column of tracked infantry fighting vehicles clatters past us, heading east toward the front. Their hatches are open, and gunners wearing padded tanker hats peer out, staring at us as they drive past.

Another Russian strike just a few days before hit a gas station in the Mykolaiv’s southeast. The station is green, though large parts of the facility are charred black and gray.

The strike and subsequent fire burned away the station’s rubber fuel hoses, leaving the metallic fuel spouts on the ground. There are impact marks on the asphalt where munitions exploded too. The small craters are the size of honeydew melons, and shrapnel marks in the asphalt bloom outward from the small impact craters.

Shrapnel shattered the pump’s glass-faced meters, and the encased mechanical meter gears are a mixed-up jumble of cogs and springs. The explosion ripped open the pump’s metal casing, revealing the burned pumping machinery inside.

Shrapnel also hit a large fuel storage tank at the edge of the station, and though it didn’t explode, the tip of my finger disappears into smooth, marble-sized gouges.

There is a puddle of dried blood next to the tank, marking where a man died. Mikhail shows us a photo taken at the gas station right after the attack and tells us that two others died here at the pump, all civilians.

Although Mykolaiv largely escaped the wholesale slaughter and destruction seen in Kharkiv, Mariupol, or in the Ukrainian capital, its streets are a jumble of shattered vehicles and buildings sprayed with shrapnel marks and blackened from fire.

On our way out of Mykolaiv back to Odessa, we pass another Ukrainian column heading east, a mixture of relatively new Ukrainian armored personnel carriers and Soviet-era infantry fighting vehicles. They’re likely heading to the front in defense of the city.