A young woman called Lyudmila walks into a cafe in Odessa, the southern Ukrainian city. Her phone is switched on and the camera set to record mode. She approaches the owner and asks for service in Ukrainian.

He declines. He says his Ukrainian language skills are poor. When she insists he makes excuses, then tells her the cafe is closed, and finally asks her to leave. But unbeknownst to the owner, Lyudmila is a member of a small Ukrainian-language vigilante group.

The group, who call themselves ‘Getting on your Nerves’, has made it their business to turn this Russophone city, founded in 1796 by Catherine the Great, into a Ukrainian-speaking one, one small intervention at a time.

Backing them up is a law, passed in 2021, that stipulates that service personnel throughout the country address and serve their patrons in Ukrainian, and only switch to Russian if that is their client’s preference.

In this case the cafe owner was reported to the authorities and soon backed down, avoiding a €200 fine. Film taken of the incident, meanwhile, shared on Tiktok, went viral among locals, ensuring that many more got the message.

The incident may count as a minor one in a country where entire cities are being reduced to rubble in artillery duels in the east.

But it represents just one small salvo in a parallel war for the heart and soul of Ukraine that is being fought in cafes, shops and restaurants throughout the country.

In Kyiv, clerics are at each other’s throats over control of church property and congregations. A minority still cleave to Moscow for spiritual guidance but most now ally with the homegrown Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

In Lviv, for centuries a Polish town, Ukrainian culture is being promoted and celebrated in everything from music to the veneration of controversial nationalist leaders of the past.

But it is the use of language that is the main battlefront in this quiet war.

Until recently Russian was the most-used language in cities outside western Ukrainian. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, and Odessa, its third, locals spoke almost exclusively Russian.

I arrived in Odessa on the night train from Kyiv last week with a companion to investigate one of the most important frontlines in this new language-and-culture war.

At first blush little seemed to have changed in Odessa since my last visit in January 2022, on the eve of war. On a rainy early morning there were few people on the main pedestrian street, Derybasivska (Deribasovskaya in Russian), the cafes were closed and we were forced to take shelter in a McDonald’s.

By the following afternoon, however, the crowds had returned with the sun. Children gathered to ride small ponies, and teenagers threw darts at a photograph of Vladimir Putin. At a café called Lviv Croissants families were bringing children to sip hot chocolates and pick at large sticky cakes.

When we tried to wander down to the Potemkin Stairs, however, immortalized in Battlefield Potemkin, the iconic film by Sergei Eisenstein, we were stopped by sentries. The entire central section of the city’s seafront, it turned out, had been closed off.

We tried a different approach and were once again turned around.

In nearby Shevchenko park, a place where couples and families stroll in the evening, small triangular signs warned of minefields only yards away.

There was a huge memorial and plaques to the hero cities of the Soviet Union,

a status granted after World War II to cities that fought the Wehrmacht with grit and distinction. Kyiv was among them, as was as Odessa, Sevastopol, Moscow, Smolensk and a handful of others.

But the plaques of the Russian cities had been smashed out of their mounts with hammers and crowbars. Only Kyiv and Odessa had remained, and, perhaps optimistically, Sevastopol in Crimea.

Defenders of this policy of de-Russification say that after centuries of rule from Moscow – both Soviet and Russian – it is only right that Ukraine now promotes its own language, identity and culture.

But others point to the fact that Odessa was founded by Catherine the Great after her military campaigner and lover, Grigory Potemkin, seized the land from Turkish control and had never been part of an independent Ukraine.

To get a flavour of what was being celebrated locally we went to the opera. They were putting on a much-loved Ukrainian national classic from the 19th century, a comic opera about a feud with the Turks.

Perhaps ironically the opera was originally written in Russian, and only later translated into Ukrainian.

We were taken to our seats by a matronly usher, who spoke to us in Russian, and then listened to a set of instructions, in Ukrainian and English, of what to do if there was an air raid during the performance.

In the square outside there was an empty plinth where until last December the likeness of Catherine had stood.

We went to market. Odessa has two notable markets: the old one is called the New Market, and a new one is called Privoz. There I talked to Galena, a 72-year-old lady with whisps of facial hair who was reading a battered Russian romantic novel and smoking long cigarettes.

She had the tiniest of stalls, selling just three jars of adzsika, a tomato-based condiment.

‘My grandmother was Ukrainian, but the rest of my family were Russian,’ she said. ‘But more than anything else we are Odessans. And we get on with each other.’

In the same row of stalls there was a Georgian bread-maker, using a deep circular clay oven to make large flat white bread, an Uzbek selling ginger, and an Azeri.

In 2014, shortly after the Maidan uprising in Kyiv overthrew the pro-Moscow president Viktor Yanukovich, a few hundred diehard Putin supporters had attempted to seize control of Odessa. There was a street fight with Ukrainian nationalists and the building they holed up in caught fire. Forty-eight people died.

But any hint of sympathy for Putin seems to have long since disappeared from Odessa.

On one of our days in the city we took a rickety old tram a half-hour north and visited a family for tea. They were of mixed Russian and Ukrainian descent. Russian was their mother tongue.

The matriarch of the house, a religious woman who led grace before we sat down, said: ‘I am half Russian and half Belarussian. But Moscow sent its paratroopers to try and seize our beach when the war started. I just wanted them all to be blown to bits!’

As for ‘Getting on your Nerves,’ its founder, Kateryna, was also once a Russian-speaker.

But that changed the day her grandfather was killed by a Russian shell fired into Odessa.

At a shop that sold military clothing and patches I talked to Sergei, a 26-year-old merchant seaman. Sergei once worked on cargo ships but has now been grounded by an edict that stipulates that men of fighting age must not leave Ukraine.

He was dismissive of the language law and the activists who sought to promote it.

‘I think everyone should be able to speak the language they want,’ he said.

But when I asked if his linguistic orientation might translate into any sympathy for Russia, his face hardened.

‘Absolutely not,’ he said. ‘There is only one road out of this war, and it passes through a Ukrainian victory.’

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