Few places have been renamed as often as this one. In the seventh and sixth centuries BC, Greek colonists founded a trading settlement here called Alektor, part of the same wave of expeditions that raised the great city of Pontic Olbia just up the estuary. The site later passed under Roman authority, then fell during the migrations that swept the steppe. Medieval Romanian speakers knew it as Vozia, supposedly for a medicinal elder plant that grew in abundance nearby. In the 1490s the Crimean Khanate built a castle on the strait, and once the Ottomans absorbed it the fortress became Ozi, the seat of an entire province. Travelers passing through in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries recorded a genuine crossroads of peoples: Turks and Tatars ruling, Moldavians farming the villages, and Greek merchants trading in the harbor. The town was still called Ozi when Russia finally seized it for good.

Because the fortress controlled access to the rivers, it was besieged again and again. In 1737, during the Russo-Turkish War, Marshal von Munnich's army stormed the Ottoman stronghold in a single blood-soaked assault, only for Russia to abandon it two years later and hand it back to the Sultan. A naval battle raged offshore in 1788, and the Treaty of Jassy in 1792 at last transferred the town to the Russian Empire, which renamed it Ochakov. During the Crimean War the sister fortress at Kinburn fell to a combined Anglo-French fleet in October 1855, and the Russians destroyed their own fort at Ochakiv rather than see it captured. Each war rewrote the map, resettled the population, and left another layer of ruin and rebuilding on the same narrow neck of land.

For much of the twentieth century Ochakiv settled into a quieter identity as a fishing port and a modest seaside resort, its beaches drawing summer visitors to the estuary shore. The town's most recognizable landmark is a low white building that has lived several lives: raised as a mosque in the fifteenth century, converted to the church of Saint Nicholas in 1804, rebuilt in Russian style in 1842, and later given over to a museum honoring the general Suvorov. Ochakiv also became home to a small Ukrainian naval facility. The strategic doorway that made the town matter for two millennia has never stopped mattering. Of the roughly 14,000 people who lived here before the full-scale war, only about half remained, and the naval base and town alike were struck in the Russian invasion of Ukraine.