Yeah, it’s not quite as hard to take a city when the city is populated by a large number of people who are loyal to the attackers rather than the occupiers.
If i were a parent in Kherson who got the memo on my kids being confiscated by the state run by a twice unelected agitprop merchant pretending to be a Gauleiter, and shipped to Russia via Crimea, it wouldn’t matter which way I voted in the fake referendum. My allegiance would be determined by whether that story is true.
The other factor is, Stremousov has allied himself to the “nuke ‘em” faction so consider the scenario if the kids do get bussed out of the city leaving it with expendable cannon fodder from both sides and sn expendable population that’s 80% anti-annexation (the referendum was a fake.)
State sponsored genocide combined with use of WMDs following the forced abduction of hundreds of not thousands of kids, would put Russia so deep into terrorist state territory that all bets would be off.
Vatnik piñatas off every lamp post wouldn’t be out of the question.