Small update:
Cherson fell in the evening. The Putin army has reported this several times, but this time it seems to be true because the Ukrainian government has confirmed it.
Now the occupiers can cross the Dnieper - and between them and Odessa, 200 kilometers away, there is only one well-developed road, the M14 about the town of Mykolayiv, which is already heavily fought over.
While the aggressors now hired killers from Chechnya and the notorious "Group Wagner" (a 3,500-strong private army of the oligarch and Putin friend Yevgeny Prigozhin) are increasingly doing the dirty work because the combat morale of the Russian conscripts has dropped massively, on formed an "International Legion" on the Ukrainian side.
Military trained volunteers from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Austria, Norway, Sweden, Japan, USA and Canada are fighting in this unit - so far. Quite comparable to the "International Brigades" during the Spanish Civil War - only better trained.
One hears and reads more and more about cases in which Russian soldiers have refused combat orders - and not individually, but as a whole! Apparently their officers lied to them across the board that maneuvers were going on.
Apparently, on the first day of the war, February 24, not only was the naval base in Odessa to be destroyed, but marines were also supposed to be landed in order to occupy the city itself. These Crimean marines refused to take orders - they didn't want to fight Odessa! The landing did not take place!
You have to know that the fathers and grandfathers of these soldiers fiercely defended Odessa for more than three months against the Germans and Romanians in the summer of 1941 - with huge losses. And today's soldiers did not want to fight against the fathers and grandfathers of those to whom they are linked by spilled blood.
Cheers
