You don’t need a great percentage of the population to be against you in a city of two million. VSU are fighting dirty, placing MRLS and SPGs in residential areas.
If you’d look at “protests” in other locations, they are laughable, like astroturfed crowds of 200 people.
80% east of Dnieper want the Russians there.
except we are seeing this kind of resistance throughout the northern border area on up to Sumy and beyond in medium and small towns
from the attacks on troops and tanks and other vehicles looks very much like a grass roots resistance that was not at all expected by the Russian military based on their initial tactics