t had been hundreds of years since the world paid much attention to the Danube river port of Izmail at the edge of the estuary that now separates Romania and Ukraine. The Russian and Ottoman empires traded blows here in the 18th century, and one epic battle in 1790 was so central to Moscow’s concept of its military power that it was glorified in the country’s first unofficial national anthem. Then the area slipped back into obscurity, traded back and forth between competing powers, a smuggler’s paradise of sprawling wetlands and loosely policed borders.
