In the port city of Odesa, where Russian has long been the language of daily life and love songs, a council vote this week asks a question that war has made urgent and philosophy has always found difficult: can a language be separated from the power that wielded it? The proposal to ban Russian from public arts, libraries, and streets is part of a broader Ukrainian effort to reclaim identity from centuries of imperial imposition — yet it arrives in a city where the soldiers defending Ukraine often speak the very language the ban would silence. What unfolds in Odesa may quietly determine how a n