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Odesa strikes and Moscow's display of captured armour
Summary
On 1 May 2024, ballistic missiles hit Odesa while Moscow showed off Western-made vehicles taken in Ukraine.
What did 1 May 2024 show about the war's two fronts, one of fire and one of messaging? On that day, two Russian ballistic missiles struck the port city of Odesa, killing three people and injuring sixteen others.
The attack came two days after another missile strike on Odesa, on 29 April 2024, which killed four people and injured 28. Ukraine said Russia had used an Iskander-M ballistic missile with a cluster warhead in that earlier attack. Within days, therefore, the port city had suffered two deadly strikes involving ballistic missiles.
The same day, in Moscow, Russia opened an open-air exhibition of captured NATO military vehicles and equipment in Victory Park on Poklonnaya Hill. Among the exhibits were a German Leopard 2 tank and an American M1 Abrams tank, both Western-made machines that had ended up in Russian hands.
Two kinds of signal
The two events were separate, and nothing links them causally. Together, though, they marked the day. In Odesa, civilians bore the cost of missile strikes. In Moscow, the display put Western-supplied armour on show for the public.
The casualty figures from Odesa, seven dead and 44 injured across the two strikes, show how heavily the city was hit in the space of three days.
